Colin Randall

From his snowy encampment in Shildon, Pete Sixsmith assesses the great letdown that was the second half at St James’ Park. He clears everyone – especially Chopra and Howard Webb – of conspiracy, and admits that we didn’t in the end deserve the three points that were so comfortably in our grasp at half time. Forget Joe Kinnear’s idiotic bombast, forgive Webb for a decision even he must now see as lamentable and back the Lads to go on and reach round five and thrash Stoke City….

Right, let’s get an assessment of the game out of the way first before I start on Howard Webb and the Premier League refereeing fraternity.

It was an exciting game with lots of committment, heavy tackles, near misses and fascinating sub plots. It was the kind of game that typifies English football at its most raw and it was perfect local derby fare, – with a fair result at the end.

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Pete Sixsmith goes undercover to venture behind enemy lines. Did he survive? Read on… .

The time is 10.30 and I am ensconced in a safe house in Dunston, awaiting the right time to set off on the most dangerous part of my mission, ie infiltrate the Toon.

I drove up the motorway having taken anything that suggested that I was one of the chosen people out of my car. Pretending to be a Mag, I slumped over the wheel with my prosthetic beer belly resting on the dashboard and a look of pain and misery in my dull,downcast eyes.

I remember being told that the best thing to do is to blend in with the locals and not stand out.

As it is Sunday morning and most sound and responsible English people will be heading for church, I have decided to enter the enemy stronghold dressed as a typical middle class Englishman.

Believe me, getting the spats, the frock coat and the bowler hat took a while but now that I am actually in them, I will obviously blend in and my appearance will hardly raise a glance as I stroll up Pink Lane, past Bob Monkhouse’s old night club and into The Strawberry for a pre game snifter.

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On March 4 1967, having already beat Newcastle United 3-0 at St James’ Park back in October, with goals from George Mulhall, Neil Martin and John O’Hare, we did the same at home, Bobby Kerr grabbing two and Mulhall the other. The team was Montgomery, Irwin, Harvey, Todd, Kinnell, Baxter, Kerr, O’Hare, Martin, Herd, Mulhall. Today, we have – theoretically – one of our best chances of doing the double over the Mags in the 42 years that have passed since then. By the time many Salut! Sunderland readers see Pete Sixsmith‘s preview, we will know which SAFC put in an appearance today: the one that can win an away game 4-1 or sneak a deserved 2-1; the one that scrapes a draw; or the one that inflicts yet more disaapointment on the fans….Ha’way the Lads

Well, here I am lurking behind enemy lines trying to get a fix on the “Big Match” tomorrow. Have spent the afternoon in a strange town called Ashington where the natives speak in incomprehensible accents and make utterances abour “gannin’ doon the toon to see off the Mackems tha kna’s”.

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Paul McMillan would call it an abuse of executive power. To me, it was a routine exchange between newspaper pros. Dec 4 2008, as all Sunderland fans know and Newcastle fans pretend to have forgotten, was the eve of a momentous occasion: the 100th anniversary of our 9-1 win at St James’ Park in what was a Toon championship season.
I had written a restrained, objective piece about the centenary for the sports pages of The National, and was second into the office that morning. Paul, who works for the online edition, was first. Noticing that my article seemed to be nowhere on The National’s website, I made my first decision of the day and asked Paul to put it there. My request, of course, had no more to do with partisan sentiment than his compliance smacked of cap-doffing by a downtrodden worker. I acted for the greater good of the paper.
And in time, whatever he felt, Paul forgave me. When I asked him to write about the coming weekend’s Tyne-Wear derby, he agreed like a shot. It was his chance for revenge.
You saw the first instalment here; here’s the second, his answers to our questions……

What on earth do you make of events at St James’ Park this season? Fun for Sunderland, a mystery to neutrals, but must be humiliating for Mags…

Watching Newcastle has always been compared to a soap opera. But this season we’ve been more Crossroads than Coronation Street.

It’s been clueless from top to bottom.
I did not have high hopes at the start of the season and have had to lower my expectations with almost every game. For the first since we came into the Premier League I would be happy with a 17th place finish.
I think appointing a headstrong manager like Keegan and then, effectively, making him a puppet while Dennis Wise buys players was idiotic to the extreme. We are now stuck with a squad of players who are not motivated on the pitch or trying to move on.
I welcomed the appointment of Joe Kinnear – as a stopgap – but it’s not looking as good now with the transfer window about to close and (at the time of writing) no signings to get excited about.
In fact, it sums up our season that Kinnear was appointed to steady the ship but instead rocked the boat with an impressive 52 expletives in his first press conference.
Personally, I think he could have increased the transfer kitty by releasing a festive cover of John Cooper Clarke’s spoken-word classic Evidently Chickentown” (look it up on YouTube).

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Courage or folly?
Picture: dgolfrabbit

Let’s face it it. It doesn’t get much better as a Sunderland football fan. We’ve raced away with promotion championships, got to playoff deciders, played Norwich and Liverpool in Wembley cup finals, stormed into a 4-0 half-time lead against Chelsea…..but beating the Mags 2-1 in successive seasons at St James’ Park brought ecstasy into our lives. Here, repeated from the earlier days of Salut! Sunderland, is one of the stories from one of those games..

PART 2 OF THE MAGS WHO ARE THEY? APPEARS HERE FROM FRIDAY NOON (UK TIME)

The story ends at St James’ Park, at the second of those 2-1 wins. Or rather afterwards in Fenwick’s.

But it begins on a Club Med holiday in Corfu, where Big Jim and I first met when. Standing in a queue for something or other, we discovered that we shared a surname. With this flimsy excuse for friendship, we met up a few times for drinks or tennis – Jim being as wide as he’s tall and therefore useful at the net.

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In that wonderful, heartwarming world of bonhomie and banter that is football, the Tyne-Wear derby (yes, I know that reverses the natural order of things, but it is an away game) occupies a special place. Mackems and Geordies may say they loathe one another, but that does not really do justice to the true nature of the relationship.
Loathe, when all is said and done, is just too weak a word. For some.
Other side of the coin? Salut! Sunderland seems to have little trouble finding Mags willing to penetrate enemy territory to the extent of writing for us with enthusiasm and flair – and for nowt – about such games.
We prefer to ask ordinary fans, and cannot always get the big names anyway; Joe Kinnear might have seemed an obvious choice, given the warmth of his feelings for gentlemen of the press, but a spokesman for the Queen’s English Society, which these days represents him, said: “He’s too *&#ing busy, you ^*+$ing c*!#.” Mike Ashley felt we’d misquoted him last time he did it.
So we turned to Paul McMillan*, a good bloke and fellow hack in Abu Dhabi. We saw it as our contribution to the principle of offering care in the community; the poor lad had scorned a glorious boyhood opportunity, growing up in Washington but taking his allegiance across the Tyne on board the Bryan Ferry.
Paul repaid our kindness with the following heap of venom….

Among the unwanted socks, smellies and chocolates I received as Christmas gifts last year was the surprise stocking filler Geordies vs. Mackems: Why Tyneside is better than Wearside by Ian Black.

The book contains a series of jokes, anecdotes and one-liners at the expense of “The Great Unwashed” such as:

Q: What’s the first question in a Sunderland pub quiz?
A: “What are you looking at?”

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Pete Sixsmith is not getting carried away. Why should it be otherwise? We narrowly beat a limited Fulham side and, though we could have doubled or tripled the margin, we could also have drawn or lost had they made more of the two or three glaring lapses of concentration at the back. Our distribution in the first half was woeful. BUT WE WON, and Pete – whose half-time verdict was “turgid” – is content. But if you were among the idiots booing Paul McShane, even when he’d kicked the ball, prepare yourself for a well deserved scolding from teacher…..

PART 1 OF OUR TYNE-WEAR DERBY PREVIEW
APPEARS TONIGHT

To paraphrase Robbie Burns, who was 250 (sort of) on Sunday, all wins are important and this one was a win of such importance that the Bard of Ayrshire (Burns, not the ubiquitous John Penman) may well have been tempted to write a paen in praise of Kenwyne’s lightning fast reactions as he pounced on Schwarzer’s parry to win the game for us.

He didn’t do a great deal more, but I do think that some people expect far too much of him.

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Pete Sixsmith is down in the dumps. Instead of being comfortably placed in the league and awaiting an easy passage into the quarter finals (home to Coventry), we look shaky going into the next two Premier games, unlikely to overcome Blackburn in the cup and facing the loss of a defender Pete describes as “an excellent player with a good touch and a lovely feel for the ball”. But hey, we’ll keep Kenwyne, beat Fulham and the Mags, buy well before the window closes and steam forward towards the FA Cup semis. Won’t we?

Selwyn Frogget, a comedy character of the 1970s played by Bill Maynard, had a catchphrase: “Magic our Maurice.” And he stuck his two thumbs up to signify that something was good.

ITV and Setanta have used the phrase Magic to describe the FA Cup as many times as Selwyn did – and like that not much lamented sitcom, they are failing to pull in the viewers.

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Fulham vs Sunderland mosaic
by… JonHall

As we approach Tuesday’s vital return to Premier football, Fulham have a clear psychological advantage. While we pottered to a dull 0-0 draw with Blackburn, with them having the better chances and both of us now facing our fifth encounter of season, Fulham won a place in the 5th round, albeit by beating modest opposition in the form of Kettering Town.
They’re also rather higher than us in the league, even though just about everyone who saw the first game between us, at Craven Cottage, seems to agree that we were by far the better side and should have won.
Strange club, Fulham. When Salut! Sunderland can actually find a Fulham fan to preview a game, we get great stuff; witness Joe Jenkins’s piece ahead of that first game and Steve Battams‘s offering last season. But it has been a long search for anyone to have a go before Tuesday (though we did have a promise of photographs from Jon Hall, who will be among what will surely be a tiny band of away fans making the trip).
There was silence from Vital Fulham, although the Vital network had produced good responses for both the Villa and Blackburn games, and other approaches drew a blank. So was it a bit of a collective “BOG OFF MACKEM!”, to quote one Fulham soul, “Al Billy”, in his reply to a similar request last October for a witty or wise Fulham fan to write here?
Not quite. Fortunately, Steve Battams* – who chalked up 550 games in his own semi-pro playing career, Staines Town, Ashford Town and Carshalton Athletic – was willing to stand in as supersub and return to these pages with his updated thoughts. Steve likes our front two – let’s hope they still ARE our front two when the transfer window closes – thinks we’ll stay up and would settle for a draw on Tuesday. Over to him…..

Salut!….Looks from here as if Fulham are having a better season than most would have expected. Does that sum up how you feel?

Steve… Pretty much, although the way we played our way out of trouble last season under exceptional pressure gave me hope for the start of this campaign. It is clear that Roy Hodgson is an experienced coach who gets the best out of the players available to him and I hope this continues.

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One win, one draw, one defeat. The nature of the FA Cup means that one of us, Sunderland or Blackburn Rovers, must finish on top following our quartet or quartet+replay of clashes this season. Glen Mullan*, seen above with a lady he’ll forgive us for calling very much the better half, is as Rovers as they come, Blackburn born and totally committed to his club. He suspects Saturday will produce a winner: a 1-0 victory, but for whom he isn’t sure. In truth, we all probably want a great cup run, but most of us – maybe all – want Premier football even more.
Glen, who posts at Vital Blackburn Rovers, part of the Vital Football Network but also enjoys trawling the sites of other clubs’ fans, offers a vision of Newcastle tumbling through the leagues – pause for expressions of sadness all round – and explains why, despite his implacable allegiance Rovers, a strict view on home town support condemns his sons to follow another team……

Sunderland yet again – fourth game, three of them away (for you). Can you face yet another gone against us?

A bit sick of playing Sunderland; had you a few times in cup in recent years. Rovers have a very good record against all the North-eastern clubs especially away from home. I’m sure this will be a tight game and I’m not expecting a classic.

Football romantics wanted Sunderland v Blyth but they might settle for either of us winning the cup. What chances either club?

Both clubs, like anyone, have a chance in the cup this year, I think a lot depends on the kindness of the draw. Once you get through to the quarter final stage in recent years the cup draw has opened up nicely for the so-called smaller clubs. An example of this is the all-Premiership ties in the earlier rounds, which allows lower division clubs the opportunity to progress. At the quarter-final stage these are the type of teams you want to be drawn against knowing a victory will put you one match away from Wembley.

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