Colin Randall

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

Who are you? We’re Bolton’s Burnden Aces

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boltonchris


This is not a clash of football’s elite. Sunderland and Bolton may command top 10 places for Facebook visits (with Sunderland at the top), but that is where our league table successes begin and end.
You’d expect Wanderers fans to be cock-a-hoop after that great result at Upton Park, itself coming on the heels of victory against Wolves. Chris Mann* from the Burnden Aces fans site – who has already previewed SAFC v Bolton for Salut! Sunderland, only for the game to be snowed off – welcomes the brighter outlook but predicts something Sunderland supporters have forgotten the feeling of – a home win at the Stadium of Light tomorrow night …

Salut! Sunderland: So now, despite your great win at Upton Park, it’s a six pointer. We didn’t expect to be having those at the wrong end of the table this season. Did you?

The fans would rather not be battling it out at the wrong end of the table, but after the first few games we could all see we were in for yet another long season! Back-to-back wins for the first time in a year have helped ease the suicidal mood around the place. A week ago we were looking doomed, it’s amazing what a couple of games can do in this poor league.

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Soapbox: Barton, Barwell and bloody Bolton

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soapbox


A sad, deluded Wanderers fan expressed the fear, in a comment to the last posting here, that Bolton had a habit of losing to “rubbish teams”. He probably thought he was insulting us; little did he know plenty of Sunderland fans would regard that as a relatively kind description of what they’ve been watching since the back end of November. Pete Sixsmith chooses a non-League warm-up to what he hopes will not be another heap of rubbish…


Another Saturday afternoon and I ain’t got no football, as Sam Cooke might have sung had he been a Sunderland fan.

This is the second of three successive Saturdays without a game and with another one coming up at the end of the month, that give us four out of five blanks on the day we associate with watching our beloved red and white striped shirts struggling to avoid relegation.

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The Hammers hate Bolton: we just fear them

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West Ham 1 Bolton 2. Highly unwelcome news from the East End. Please let that be the end of the Wanderers’ revival …

Rapidhammer, one of my partners in crime at FootballUnited.com, has just posted a match report headed “I hate Bolton”.

Since I had come to regard the Hammers as certainties to climb out of trouble, I hate them tonight. This was surely a home banker. How could they do it to us?

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A six-pointer against Bolton at home: not for purists

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luke

For his second piece for Salut! Sunderland, Luke Harvey – whose presence would be welcome if it did no more that bring down the average age around these parts – looks forward, if that is the correct phrase in our current state, to Bolton at home on Tuesday …


Michael Owen is injured. Alex Ferguson is complaining about a pitch. Ian Wright is having a good moan as well.

It seems that the world is back to business as usual following the reckless challenge from Ryan Shawcross last week that put Aaron Ramsey out for the rest of the season and captured our attention for the majority of last week.

We, too, are moving on. With a clichéd “make-or-break” match with Bolton coming up on Tuesday, we’ll be much happier to compete against our fellow knuckle-dragging northerner neanderthals. Rather than being up against another slice of football’s elite, it will be a case of 22 men spending 90 minutes kicking legs, ankles, faces and occasionally the ball too. Won’t it?

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Bruce in

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Back to normal business – ie worrying about our own problems – we question the wisdom of clamouring for Steve Bruce’s dismissal but caution Sunderland AFC against taking future support for granted …

The man behind me, in row 31 of the East Stand, was calling for Steve Bruce’s head before the first half was over against Fulham.

In the second half, I heard – well, couldn’t fail to hear – him shout: “You’ve half an hour to save your job, Bruce.”

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Supporting Arsène, Arsenal and Aaron. And, a little bit, Ryan.

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On the Ramsey/Shawcross affair, we still await the thoughts of Monty and Rupert, names that somehow seemed to personify posh London football support when they were announced on tannoy at Arsenal v Sunderland. Lots of others, notably Gooners, have had their say, however, and not least at Salut! Sunderland …

Just before the kickoff of Stoke v Arsenal, the TV screen (sound down) showed Arsène Wenger and my football-loathing wife started on about how much better dressed, better spoken, more intelligent, better everything he was than your usual football character.

She’s French so would say as much. But it’s a view that I happen, up to point, to share.

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Grand Central’s pledge to messed-about travellers

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Sunderland and Fulham fans, students and all others caught up in the events of last night, when services came to a standstill on the Home Counties stretch of the east coast main line: take note.

Our report of the delay has attracted a full response from Grand Central, the operator used – generally with great satisfaction – by London-based SAFC supporters. Passengers are invited to return the relevant part of their tickets for refunds for the affected journey.

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Soapbox: where do we go from here?

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soapbox

Pete Sixsmith looked for something positive to say about the excruciating bore draw against Fulham. He looked, you will not be surprised to hear, in vain. You would do your own looking in vain if you wanted sharper analysis of our present malaise …

The gents’ toilets in the East Stand is a pretty good place to test the post match feelings of those refined and cultured Red and Whites who frequent that august structure. After a famous victory, it is buzzing with laughter and joy. After a humiliating defeat it is a place of doom and gloom. After horrible games like Sundays, it is a place of almost sepulchral quiet.

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SAFC 0 Fulham 0: Grand Central blues

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Colin Randall crowns a grand, pleasure-free day out at the Stadium of Light by sitting on a crowded Grand Central train stuck in the wilderness for more than three hours with no particular place to go


You know, said Lee, the man in the Wetherspoons pub before the game, I just have a feeling in my bones we’re going to beat them.

But didn’t Lee also think Aston Villa would win the Carling Cup, that Ryan Shawcross was a shade unlucky to be sent off and that the earth was very flat indeed?

In fact, isn’t Lee just the sort of optimist who’d convince himself the Grand Central train back down from Sunderland to Kings Cross would never in a million years manage to get stuck indefinitely behind a “failed train” in the middle of nowhere, allegedly between Huntingdon and Stevenage?

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