Colin Randall

The English always announce the arrival of winter snow in astounded tones, yet every year it snows. So sang Sandy Denny. Pete made the most of what was left of Saturday’s cup-restricted, weather-ravaged football, and caught a thriller. Thawing out, he muses on the declining allure of Premier football and wanders whether we might even be able to snatch something at Arsenal…..

A week without that rising tension in the pit of the stomach as you begin to think about Saturday’s game.

A week free from looking to see which black shirted buffoon will spoil the game on Saturday.

A Saturday away from trying to forecast the best combination of results that will enable us to entertain another glorious attempt to scale the foothills of the Premier League. A day where you can look at copious non league fixtures and choose the most esoteric available.

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Sunderland mosaic
Originally uploaded by JonHall

Put this posting down to la treve. That’s how French football deals with the depths of winter: a break in the season when bad weather might be expected (or so my late father-in-law used to claim; I always thought it had more to do with players wanting to eat, drink and be merry).

Sunderland’s own February treve, an unintended two-week gap between games resulting from our cheap exit from the FA Cup, allowed a few Mag-baiting imaginations to run riot at Blackcats forum. Salut! Sunderland nearly allowed its own thoughts to go the same way before deciding instead on a nice, safe, feelgood set of photographs from the recent SAFC v Fulham game.

Walking to the ground
Originally uploaded by JonHall

Jeremy Robson had started it over at the Blackcats forum, dreaming from his Canadian wilderness of misspent days in the Clock Stand Paddock. What, he asked, is there to hate about Newcastle? Quite a lot, it seems. It is fair to say the list of answers Jeremy initiated has since grown like Topsy as other supporters have chipped in..

File it under Mostly Good Fun, alongside Ian Black’s have-it-both-ways book Mackems vs Geordies/Geordies vs Mackems….

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With time on our hands – no football of the sort that matters to us until a week on Saturday – Salut! Sunderland‘s thoughts started to stray.

So it seemed a good time to introduce you to a fellow supporter with a dress sense all of his own.

Chris Butler collects football shirts. Not just any, but – for the most part – Sunderland shirts. And not just any SAFC tops (we all have those, and they’re replicas), but ones that have actually been worn by our players.

So he has the shirt worn by Gary Rowell for the home game against the Mags on April 8 1977 (a 2-2 draw), and Nicky Summerbee’s from our hapless promotion play-off final against Charlton in 1998..

In all, Chris – Sunderland born but living down south since he was a young lad – has about 100 shirts, of which the overwhelming majority, 85 or so, are Sunderland match-worn players’ shirts. He also has a signed replicas from the 1973 FA Cup-winning year.

Read on for Chris’s own story – and visit his website: www.sunderlandshirts.com

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So amid all the baiting of Rob Styles, I came across Jeff Winter’s website, The Ref Fights Back, by accident and then remembered that his book – Who’s The B*****d In The Black?: Confessions of a Premiership Referee – has been sitting on my desk at work for months.

As a lad, Jeff was – let’s not mince words – a Lad. In the book, he attempts to draw a neat distinction between being a hooligan and just standing up for yourself. But when he talks of trying to “take the Fulwell End” before eventually coming to the conclusion that he should distance himself from such antics, the distinction seems to blur a little.

But unlike lots of Sunderland fans, I liked him as a ref. He may be a Smoggie, and may have reffed with chest puffed put quite a long way, but I thought he was a good, strong official and they are the ones I tend to admire.

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Salut! Sunderland is fair-minded. We’ve had our go at Rob Styles – how could we have avoided it? – and it’s time to move on. We could praise the much-maligned Dean Whitehead for his outstanding game on Saturday. Pete Sixsmith sticks up in turn for Cisse and Collins. He is also beginning to sense safety despite tough games to come (or at least he would if only it got warm enough to restore the use of his senses)…

A friend of mine said a couple of weeks ago that he would be happy with seven points out of the Fulham, Mags and Stoke games. He would have been a happy man on Saturday night as we clambered up the league table to the giddy heights of 11th – almost on to that elusive first page of Ceefax.

To say that Saturday’s win was workmanlike would be a little uncharitable to those who profess to be workmen. The word brings connotations of people going about their jobs in a steady and efficient manner, doing what they were told to do and making sure the task was completed on time.

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Whatever the reason, they show little interest in engaging in friendly banter with Salut! Sunderland. The response to our approaches varies:

* I’m off on a cruise and far, far too busy anyway

* Yeah ok. How much you going to pay me. My paypal address is available to you for a tenna

* F*** off you twat

We are being unfair, but only just. Julian Boodell wrote a long, detailed and much appreciated preview of the game at the Britannia earlier in the season. The cruiser was instrumental in getting him to do it, though the tone of the latest rejection suggests she wishes to receive no further approaches should we still be playing each other next season.

But then Stoke City have a long history of stonewalling. They invented the boring, defensive, all we want is a point game – or so it seemed to Pete and me back in 1963, when they came to Roker Park for a draw and got it (our dropped point making them Division 2 champions and keeping us down).

So yes, that was the long way of saying we could entice no Stoke fan to preview the game at the SoL on Saturday. Julian and the cruiser did try to find us one fellow fan apiece, without luck, and Julian offered this cheering thought: “Happy to do it next season if our paths cross! I think we will both be in the Prem. West Brom Pompey and The Bar codes to go down.”

Deprived of a preview for the first time since this series was launched in the middle of last season, Salut! Sunderland has chosen to wind the clock back to 2001. Below you will find a little of the excellent article Stephen Foster, author of She Stood There Laughing and pictured above, wrote in The Guardian about his lifelong support of what were then a bunch of hopeless losers:

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Can anyone be blamed for not bothering with last night’s FA Cup 4th round replay at Ewood Park? When he read Ricky Sbragia’s pre-match threat to send out a “weakened side”, Pete Sixsmith probably felt he’d seen enough of the reserves already, and without having to cross the Pennines in winter. Let alone seen enough of Blackburn. As a result, he says, Soapbox will be “not very insightful”. But read on; absence has merely made his art grow stronger……

Having declined to make the journey to Blackburn, I listened to the game courtesy of BBC Radio Newcastle.

Being a renaissance man, I did the ironing, thumbed through The Guardian, read a book and half watched that dire Everton vs Liverpool game on TV (would have been interesting to hear how ITV tried to talk up that dross) while concentrating on the news from Ewood Park.

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Realistic or deeply disappointing? Does it mean Ricky Sbragia actually wants us to be kicked out tonight, even though the draw for the fifth round – Coventry at home – gives us a massive chance of reaching the quarter finals? Does it matter if that’s the case?

Are we so much under threat of relegation that Stoke at home is our cup final? And perhaps worst of all, is Ricky talking down the cup and talking up the Stoke game in such a way that we lose tonight because we don’t care, and fail on Saturday because the pressure on the players will be overwhelming?

This is what Ricky told BBC Radio Newcastle about tonight’s replay at Blackburn:

“In general, I’m going to play a lot of the squad players and I might hand a couple of debuts to the younger players because we’ve got a massive game against Stoke on Saturday,” he said.

“I don’t know what Sam [Allardyce] is going to do but in my point of view I’ll be going down to Blackburn with a weakened team.”

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This posting started out as a simple desire to maintain tradition. Stoke fans are making us sweat for later in the week, but Salut! Sunderland has managed to find an opposing fan for every forthcoming game since we launched the Who Are They? feature in the middle of last season. This season, that has meant finding five Blackburn Rovers fans, Mike Delap*, to his relief and ours, is the last one. There HAS to be a result tomorrow night. Doesn’t there? Well, yes, but there has to be a game first. If it’s called off, this preview/commentary on our two clubs will be withdrawn and wheeled out again when the time comes. Thank you, Mike, pictured (right, with his best mate Luke Johnson on the left, with his father-in-law Ian Futter), and for being a Geordie’s son who cannot stomach the Mags. Salut! Sunderland readers should check out the Vital Blackburn site, where Mike is a regular contributor. And let us hope you are right in saying we’ll be playing each other all over again next season and in the Premier…

That’s one win apiece, two draws and now there has to be a decider! At least we won’t see each other again this season – how will this one go?

Can I start by saying that I am absolutely sick of the sight of Sunderland this season! It’s not that I dislike Sunderland, in fact I have no grudges at all (for grudges please see: Hotspur, Tottenham and United, West Ham) but the fact we are about to play you for the 5th time this season is frankly crazy!

All the games have been tight tense affairs and it is a show that the teams are evenly matched this season. As for the “decider” as we are at home and I am an optimist at heart, I am going to go for a blue and white army win, if you were to hold a gun to my head (please don’t) I would say a 2-0 victory with McCarthy and Pedersen scoring.

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