Colin Randall

Salut! Sunderland was edited by Colin Randall up until December 2019 - read more

Sunderland’s demise: blame Moyes, blame Short, blame life

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M Salut: ‘can I use this baguette to batter anyone planning to vote Le Pen?’

Forgive Monsieur Salut for feeling down. How can a Sunderland supporter be otherwise?

The poor response, in terms of readers, to yesterday’s pre-match package, a very good ‘Who are You?’ and another prize Guess the Score, suggested lots of us have simply lost interest.

We remain fans of the only club we’ve properly supported but we feel cheated at the same time. The club has let us down in a big way. We may well fear, as did our Boro interviewee, for life in the Championship. But here, for what it is worth, is my preview of the Tees-Wear derby for ESPNFC, cleverly headlined ‘Last Rites for Sunderland as relegation looms into view’ …

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Middlesbrough vs Sunderland Guess the Score as the curtain crashes down

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Guess the Score: still offering prizes

Let’s not beat about the bush. Wrinkly Pete’s rose-tinted crystal ball couldn’t save us and nor could my sister and her family’s Boro passions save them from the drop. We are both going down, leaving little more than pride – and avoidance of bottom place – at stake at the Riverside on Wednesday.

The maths are simple enough. We lose at Boro and Hull need only a win and draw from four games – even allowing for goal difference changes – to send us down. Say they drew two and lost two; we’d still have to win five of our six remaining games and hope Swansea and Boro didn’t stand in our way.

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The Middlesbrough ‘Who are You?’: on Juninho, Lauren Laverne and two doomed clubs

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Catherine Wilson: never been to the SoL but loves Sunderland-born Lauren Laverne

So Sunderland are effectively two defeats from relegation, one if Hull were to win just one more game and goal differences remained much as now. Middlesbrough are not much better off. In other words, both clubs are doomed to the Championship with only the mathematics left to complete. Dogs in this predicament are usually put out of their misery, but we have to await the formalities of our demise. Catherine Wilson*, our Boro interviewee and bassist/vocalist with ‘North London’s favorite grungey-indie superdupergroup’ Paintings of Ships, has accepted the inevitable, a relegation perhaps sealed by chairman Steve Gibson’s unwise loyalty towards Aitor Karanka …

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West Brom, Watford safe. Palace, Bournemouth, Burnley relaxing, ‘Boro, Hull, Swansea sweating. Sunderland propping them up.

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John McCormick: We're not bottom, so is it a Happy Christmas?
John McCormick

Another empty weekend unless you’re a groundhopper like Sixer or a local league fan like Malcolm, which means it’s time for a relegation review. With six games to go in a compressed framework and a holiday coming up this is probably the last one I’ll be able to fit in.

It has been a long and tedious season (as have been the last four apart from that trip to Wembley,  only three years ago although  it seems like a lifetime, those six wins in a row, a sequence of wins against Citeh and wins at places like Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge *[see below]) and while some of our chosen teams have reached safety we haven’t and are still awaiting a conclusion.

And according to my calculations, as if you needed them, that conclusion isn’t good for us.

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From Bradford to south Manchester, Sixer’s Easter groundhopping odyssey

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Pete Sixsmith: ‘thanks heavens Sunderland aren’t the only team to watch at Easter’

Pete Sixsmith had his say with Gary Bennett on the radio as he left the Sunderland-West Ham game, had his say at Salut! Sunderland and then started to enjoy his Easter football programme. Read on for a groundhopper’s fascinating description of journeys to Yorkshire and across the Pennines to add another batch of grounds to those he has hopped between …

 

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Kate Bush says ‘Don’t give up’, and so does Wrinkly Pete

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Peter Lynn, aka Wrinkly Pete

John McCormick writes: So you think it’s bad, do you?

In this post Wrinkly Pete opens with a reminder of a time when the mortgage interest rate was just about dropping into single figures after peaking at 15%+, Sunderland were struggling in the bottom half of the second division and averaging gates of under 20,000, and down here in Liverpool the militant tendency were about to send my redundancy notice out via taxi.

Then he jumps forward almost thirty years to bring a simple message to all our readers.

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David Moyes: steering his Sunderland ship on to the rocks?

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Source: Sunderland AFC via Facebook

Sunderland look doomed and, in honesty, have done for weeks. Games that must produce points produce none or, as against Burnley and West Ham, just one. Here, James Reynolds, a freelance sportswriter, looks at the reality staring David Moyes in the face. We can question some of his conclusions (why, for example, would Moyes’s career be over if we went down?) but it’s mostly hammer hits nail on head …

With six Premier League games remaining, Sunderland need a miracle to avoid relegation to the Championship. David Moyes was thrown in the deep end a little at the start of the campaign but his side hasn’t been anywhere near good enough.

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Moyes on the Boys v West Ham Utd: ‘we needed Khazri’

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Moyes on the boys

John McCormick writes: post match, on radio five live, Fabio Borini hinted at changing-room issues. When asked to elaborate he talked about injuries but did nothing else to explain. Was something lost in translation? You might think not, given the way  David Moyes manages to suggest everything’s hunky-dory in his post-match missive:

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