At a busy period for Sunderland and therefore Salut! Sunderland, postings may appear out of natural sequence.
Pete Sixsmith’s full report on the 1-0 win over Bradford City, including his thoughts on the disallowed City “equaliser”, will be published later.
For now, premature as it may seem, let us get on with other business by inviting entries for the latest Guess the Score competition: Shrewsbury at home on Saturday.
Salut! Sunderland is proud to contribute to SAFC matchday programmes. Finally free of his annual Santa duties, Pete Sixsmith joined the 46,039 present at the game against Bradford City. Those who bought the programme will have seen these recollections of past Boxing Day encounters …
Our biggest gate of the season (so far). Will it produce more votes on the Ken-meter than the 42 we got between the poll going live after Portsmouth and the site crashing?
Some of those 42 may have been Portsmouth fans, judging by the range of ratings. It was the first time the full scale was used, which means some people thought the ref was absolute perfection while others thought he was, in Ken’s words, Coote-like (or in plain English, abysmal)
Pete Sixsmith, Santa duties over for another year, was among the bumper Boxing Day crowd of 46,039 for the important match against Bradford City. Portsmouth losing at Gillingham in the early game provided a great opportunity to make up lost ground – and we did it, if only just.
Monsieur Salut could not be among those packed inside the SoL – a quite extraordinary statistic for the third tier of English football – and could only listen to Barnes and Benno and will the Lads to victory. Sixer saw it all, including the Bradford ‘goal’ – McLaughlin fumbling and appearing to recover only after the ball had crossed the line. We often enough find themselves on the wrong end of bad decisions but seem to have got away with this one.
This is just his instant, seven-word verdict. His fuller report will make interesting reading …
John McCormick writes: This is the second time I’ve set up this post. I spent hours working round the site problems and embedding files from a remote server so I could do Pete Sixsmith’s effort justice and then it disappeared, presumably never to return. But as my granny may have said, if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing well, and Pete’s stuff is certainly worth the effort. So here we go again.
I’ve scheduled this to launch a bit earlier than normal for the series so if there are more issues – the site’s still undergoing rebuilding – I’ll have a chance to put up a third copy before Boxing Day.
Nikhil Vekaria* put heart and soul in to answering our questions in the Bradford City Who are You? only for the site to crash. We are still working on getting it back into operation – it was impossible even to see yesterday so today’s visibility was an improvement even if you cannot then do anything – read a full article, post a comment – from the home page!
Once we’re back, Nikhil’s thoughts will get their proper airing. His comments on Sunderland are heartwarming …
Monsieur Salut has a ticket. The ongoing bore of train strikes – who is the more obstinate, South West Railways or the RMT? – means a car journey down to Fratton Park …
It’s certainly a big game. But is it our game of the season given that they are five points ahead of us at the top of League One, or theirs since victory for us would cut that to two and we have two games in hand?
Monsieur Salut, for once (well twice) will be there to learn the answer to that question. He’s experienced good, bad and average days at Fratton Park over the years.
Our first home league game since the series started, meaning this is our first opportunity to get the opinion of a decent sized crowd. We didn’t expect many ratings for away games but thought we would get more people taking part when the game’s at the SOL. The cup game against Walsall did nothing to prove us right as only 9 people bothered to give us a number, and their average gave us the lowest score to date – 4.4 on the Ken-meter.
Colin Randall 
Our biggest gate of the season (so far). Will it produce more votes on the Ken-meter than the 42 we got between the poll going live after Portsmouth and the site crashing?
