Tom with Zeke, his brave and, now, nearly 100 per cent heathy son
Monsieur Salut writes: Thom Bolton, our Doncaster Rovers interviewee, is a welcome visitor to the Stadium of Light for a game he has been determined all season (like so many away fans) to attend. However, he isn’t nearly as welcome as his little lad Zeke, who will be at his second away match of the season, and who, more importantly, is making a splendid recovery from cancer. Bravo, young ‘un, and stay strong. Any other theme for this introduction pales into insignificance, though Thom’s answers present another good read in the Who are You? series …
Jake: ‘we’ve had the comic capers. Can we now please be serious again and return to winning?’
Will it be a Good Friday or are we heading for purgatory? With some trepidation, Salut! Sunderland invites readers to do what none could hope to do before the Coventry game and correctly predict the outcome of SAFC vs Doncaster Rovers.
It is reasonable to suggest that the Easter weekend will bring a clearer idea of whether we can still go up to the Championship in an automatic top-two place or have to rely on the painful lottery of the playoffs.
Donny at home on Friday is followed by a tough trip to Peterborough on Monday – not that we currently show much sign of being able to treat any game as other than tough.
This will be my last visit to our “ones to watch* series before the end of the season.
You’ll have to judge for yourself whether or not our readership, ably assisted by the Coventry Ninjas**, got it right at the beginning. For my part, with three of the five – Portsmouth, Charlton and Barnsley – fighting for second place and another two still with a chance of the playoffs I’m inclined to think they didn’t do too badly.
The problem is that the sixth club is Sunderland, and that’s who they are all fighting with.
It is one of those scorelines to be grateful for.Lille were supposed to stand aside and let moneybags Paris Saint-Germain sweep to another Ligue 1 title. Instead, it ended 5-1 to the home side and theoretically, if only theoretically, they could still catch Mbappé and his pals in the remaining games.
What is more, I saw it coming. Maybe Jack Ross needs my guidance in future before a Sunderland defence again defies logic, takes the afternoon off and allows opponents to hit five.
I didn’t get it 100 per cent right in this top-of-the-table French clash (I almost wrote battle between first and second but the 17-point gap, even after this heartening result, makes that phrase seem meaningless).
But 25-26 hours ago, I got up, checked my phone and saw that PSG had crashed to a 5-1 defeat to put their latest title celebrations on hold. But when I searched further, I saw their game was not until last night.
First things first, says Monsieur Salut. Laurie Kilpatrick, an excellent interviewee for our Coventry City Who are You?, was not among those in the sky blues section who decided a grand way of celebrating beating us 5-4 was to shower people below the away end with bottles and other missiles. From what I have seen in response to my pal Kevin Maguire’s tweets, proper City fans – Laurie included, as you shall see – are disgusted at the behaviour of the lowlife minority responsible (I was not there but imagine it will have been a minority and, sadly, every football team attracts its share of slugs).
But Laurie naturally enjoyed his day out as much as our supporters present (and listening or watching from near or far) detested theirs. Losing at home by a single goal when you score four seems, for all the obvious reasons, a lot worse than going down to the ‘disappointment, but it happens’ of a 0-1.
We rightly treasure the post-match accounts of our own Pete Sixsmith and Malcolm Dawson, so for those who can stomach it. let us for once take a look a gifted writer approaching a game from the opposing side.
Laurie’s match reports appear at his blog, A Lonely Season. Here, he wonders at his team’s attacking football, our defensive failings and what he found the quietness of the Stadium of Light. Leaving aside our unhappiness, it’s a fine piece of writing …
Phase One was accomplished midweek, when that single point was enough to move us beyond reach of Peterborough, the only team outside the top six with a chance (and the slimmest of chances at that) to pass us.
Phase two will be much more difficult as just about every team we play has something to go for and is running into form, as Coventry epitomised today.
Malcolm will be doing tomorrow’s match report, which I’m sure will be riveting reading. Until it arrives you’ll have to make do with Pete Sixsmith’s seven word post-game missive.
Monsieur Salut adds: social media is awash with angry, anguished messages about how wretched Sunderland’s defending was. You probably had to be there to appreciate just how bad, though Barnes and Benno gave a pretty good idea. Losing 5-4 in a Wembley penalty shootout is unfortunate; for a team chasing promotion to do so at home in a massively important game seems an insult to all but 2,600 or so of the 36,000 who turned up. Baldwin and Flanagan may wish to avoid reading Malcolm’s full appraisal..
Camera shy he may be, but click on Laurie’s chosen image to explore the wonders of this season’s Who are You? series
Laurie Kilpatrick is an innocent man. He wasn’t even an egg, as one of my daughters used to say, on the infamous night that Jimmy Hill – er – orchestrated the perfect finish to Coventry City’s final game of the season, a match delayed by congestion against Bristol City: making sure the players of both sides, then drawing 2-2, knew Sunderland had lost at Everton. It was the only combination of results that would send us down and keep both of them up and they played out the game without further effort.
Laurie, a London-based City fan who is the man behind The Lonely Season blog, sees the funny side of Sunderland supporters’ collective long memory. And with his answers to our questions, he upholds the high standards of our League One Who are You? interviews …
When you are in sight of an automatic promotion place, three successive home games might appear something of a gift. But nerves play a part, too, and often enough this season Sunderland have suffered less in this respect on their travels than at the Stadium of Light, says Monsieur Salut.
The first of that trio of ties, of course, is behind us. A jittery performance against Burton Albion, described by Pete Sixsmith as a team looking tired up against “sprightly’ opponents, nevertheless yielded the point that took us second top.
Sunderland under Jack Ross continue to show a welcome defiance to the idea of being defeated. And still we have a game in hand over the side we displaced, Barnsley.
Dropping two points left it a lot less likely that we can catch Luton at the top. But the run-in remains in our hands and we need only match Barnsley’s results to be be sure of finishing above them while naturally keeping an eye on what Charlton and Portsmouth are up to.
Even though today’s draw does move us into second, is the result good enough? There will be naysayers but, let’s not forget, this was not our strongest side and it was our fourth game in how many days? Surely we’d have taken this position a month ago, wouldn’t we?
Pete Sixsmith’s report will be here tomorrow. For now, here’s a quick seven word taste of what is to come:
The death of Willie McPheat from Alzheimer’s comes as a sad reminder to older Sunderland fans of a player who was never able to show the Roker Park faithful his full talents after his career was destroyed by a terrible tackle from Leeds United’s Bobby Collins in August 1962.
Like many of our players in those distant days, he was a Scot. Born in Caldercruix in Lanarkshire, he signed for us as a 16-year-old and was seen as a fine young prospect. His early progress was disturbed by a detached retina but he overcame that to make his debut in October 1960, scoring on his debut in a 2-3 home defeat to Leeds United.
