Colin Randall

Let’s get this right. You go to games at Roker Park with your mates. You scream yourself hoarse at Wembley to do your bit towards 1-0 against Leeds in 1973. You “always want Sunderland to win”. So, of course, the club you support is beyond doubt. OK, the last one was cheating, because John Irvine* did add “unless they’re playing us”. And Us is Boro. In a short but very sweet Who Are They? offering, the first of two ahead of Saturday’s game at the Riverside, John explains his schizophrenia…

Boro through and through…I am John. Retired, 61 years old.

I can’t say why, and I have considered giving up going on a number of occasions, but somehow the love affair continues.

What makes it difficult sometimes is that I usually go on my own, as most of my friends support other teams.

For a while in the 70s I actually started going to Sunderland with a lot of my friends.

I even managed to go to the 73 Final and shouted till I dropped for Sunderland to win. It was one of the most memorable occasions in my life.

However, Jack Charlton’s Boro team dragged me back to my proper roots, and I have stayed loyal ever since.

I have been a season ticket holder in the West Stand Upper since we moved to the Riverside in 1995. I always want Sunderland to win, as long as they are not playing us or sending us to the relegation places. However, I always want Newcastle to lose even if they are in a different division.

And now I believe you have some questions…….

Read more

On a cold night in Northumberland, Pete Sixsmith hoped to see a fairytale come true for Blyth Spartans and make them our FA Cup fourth round opponents. Oh well. Sadly, though it went to script, it was not a fairytale script. So we get Blackburn yet again……

It’s a corny headline but it really does sum up what happened at Croft Park last night.

The Spartans (289 fewer of them than those in the film) put up a really spirited and hard working performance against the kind of Blackburn side that one associates with visits to the Hetton Centre rather than the Stadium of Light.

Read more

Pete Sixsmith found the first half against Bolton deadly dull, the second satisfying enough to be able to look back with a more positive view of the whole game. Can we actually look forward to the first decent FA Cup run since Mick McCarthy took us to a semi-final (v Millwall) that we should have coasted?…

It’s nice to win an FA Cup tie. In all the years I have followed Sunderland we have fluctuated between good runs (73, 76, 92 and 04) and abysmal defeats (Everton 66, Orient 72, Brentford 06, Wigan 08 – feel free to insert any others) so it was good to win and to win a decent game against a side who seemed to take the competition and the game seriously.

Read more

Who needs the Queen?….

Pete Sixsmith looks back over the year and awards his own New Years Honours (Colin Randall explains the baby in a footnote)….

That’s Christmas over for another year. Hope you got lots of good presents and had a jolly good time in the bosom of your family – or at least in someone’s bosom.

I got some ace presents: a book I first read in 1958, a new shirt, a CD of Julian and Sandy from Round The Horne (although they sound suspiciously like Kevin Keegan and Terry McDermott taking a training session), a book about the French Resistance (Bellion and Laslandes) and the kitschiest alarm clock in the history of the world brought back from Kuwait by a friend of mine who is teaching there. It’s bright blue, in the shape of a mosque and the alarm is a (very) approximate rendition of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Quite something!

On the negative side, there was a truly awful display at Everton which must have had Quinny, and whoever else is in the board room at the moment, doing impersonations of Corporal Jones; my failure to be in The Lounge Inn at Southport when Stevie G (allegedly) whacked the DJ despite being in the resort; and the repeated failure of this and previous Governments to include me in the New Year’s Honours List for services to Sunderland AFC and the persistent brutalising of schoolchildren in the Ferryhill and Chilton areas.

So, what better way to fritter away the dying embers of the Christmas holiday than coming up with my own New Year’s Honours list?

Read more

Ah for the romance of the FA Cup. The great leveller that gives a whiff of glory, however fleeting, to the lads from below, and sometimes deep below, the Premier League. Didn’t we all turn our thoughts in May back to the day – whether or not we were there, or even alive – our Division Two heroes overcame the then mighty Leeds United of Don Revie to win the cup? Don’t some of us possess replica shirts from the previous Cup Final win, against Preston North end in 1937? Don’t we all want Blyth Spartans to get one over Big Sam this weekend? Well, yes. But then, how many Premier bosses will field weakened sides, vaguely hoping for some sort of run but not if it means compromising prospects of a top six finish, or survival, in the league? And how many fans of either side will turn up at the Stadium of Light, eight days after a 44,000+ gate for Sam’s real team? But hey, we’re due a run ourselves after the dismal early exits of recent times. Craig Johnson* – found at the Bolton Wanderers FC fansite BWFC UK Forum – feels the same about his club. It’ll be his first visit to Sunderland, and he expects to go back to Lancashire with Bolton’s fourth round place we secured, or at least a Reebok replay to look forward to……

Hello and happy new year to all the fans of Sunderland AFC from a supporter of the greatest football team in Lancashire, Bolton Wanderers.

Let’s get on to the topic of our clubs up and coming encounter… I shall be making my first ever trip to the Stadium of Light and Sunderland in general this Saturday.

With former Wanderers first team coach Ricky Sbragia as your new manager and Bolton fan favourite El Hadji Diouf currently playing for you, it should certainly make for a fantastic atmosphere and a great game of football.

Our recent run of form makes our 4-1 victory over you in November seem like a very long time ago. Our home defeat at the hands of our arch rivals Wigan Athletic last Sunday has left a very bitter taste and all Bolton fans are hoping that a good performance and a victory on Saturday will give our players the confidence to turn our recent poor league form around.

Maybe it’ll be the 100th Bolton victory in a match I’ve attended. See you all on Saturday and may the best team win. Now it’s time for me to tackle the questions:

Read more

With Ricky Sbragia taking his first game as manager of Sunderland, Pete Sixsmith remembers what it’s like to be the new man in charge, and reflects on the best match he ever saw. Unfortunately, it’s not Everton v. Sunderland.

When I started my first job in teaching in the dim and distant past, what you wanted was a good first day to stamp your personality on the students and the school. What I got was a group of boys who had been told by the government that they could not leave at 15 to go and work at Smart and Browns or Black and Decker, but they had to stay on until they were 16. They were quite happy to show the new teacher that they would not take a blind bit of notice of him; therefore, first day as a real teacher was a bit of a disaster.

I would imagine that Ricky Sbragia would have wanted a good first day as manager of Sunderland. He didn’t get it. Instead of D4 jumping out of windows, he got defenders and mid field players giving away senseless free kicks just outside the area, allowing Mikael Arteta to show just how he relishes playing against us. Last year he twisted Ian Harte inside out; this year he breached our wall twice to wrap the game up by half time.

Everton had no forwards but managed to score three times; we had two forwards who have great reputations and about whom we wax lyrical at times – and we didn’t manage a shot on target until the 70th minute. Says it all doesn’t it!

Read more

Like the sentimental brute who batters his girlfriend black and blue, then slobbers over her with protestations of love? A bit unfair…but Greg O’Keeffe*, who has an Everton website called Gwlad Tidings, was there to watch his boys maul Sunderland last season. And he enjoyed it. But he also has a real soft spot for SAFC – a “proper club” and much more appealing than the Mags to boot. We knew that, of course, but it’s nice to hear someone else say it. He also reckons we’ll get a draw at Goodison tomorrow, and we need one – or better – after dropping points against Blackburn…. For Pete Sixmith’s report on that game Click Here

Irrational hatreds are one of the many enduring things that make football fun.

I can’t stand Aston Villa, for no real reason, and Tranmere Rovers make my skin crawl.
But just as there are some clubs I loathe for reasons I’d struggle to explain, there are those, like Sunderland, I just like.

They are a “proper” football club and I mean that without the patronising cliché tone it could be mistaken for (Everton often get the same verdict from neutrals).

Maybe it’s the long-suffering yet knowledgeable, humorous fans. Maybe it’s the recent Irish link, whatever, I always like to see them do well.

I often meet people who tell me they feel the same way about Everton. Neither club could be described as flashy or arrogant. Sure, you’ve had a few quid to throw about of late but it’s hardly Champions League mega-bucks.

Anyway, I enjoy Sunderland visits to Goodison and as someone who lived for a short time in Gateshead I can fully understand your dislike of the mind-set of Newcastle fans. They definitely have a shared sense of arrogance based on very little substance.

Good luck for the rest of your season. And now the questions…

Read more

As SAFC confirm an 18 month contract for Ricky Sbragia, there’s little rest for Pete Sixsmith who, dismayed by the lack of Christmas Day matches, compensates by taking in two on Boxing Day.

The worst thing about Christmas is that there is rarely any football to be found on Christmas Eve and absolutely none on Christmas Day. I vaguely remember walking up to Headingley in the 1950s with my dad to watch the traditional game with Wakefield Trinity, but I can’t ever remember seeing football on Christmas Day. The last full league programme was on Christmas Day 1957, so since then people like me have had to put up with presents and turkey and brandy and bloody Cliff Richard and just hang on until Boxing Day for the football fix.

I can usually get a couple of games in on the 26th and this year was no exception. The majority of Northern League games are being played on the 27th. But the Billingham derby between Town (the junior club) and Synthonia (named after a particularly smelly chemical) kicked off at 11.00am and resulted in a deserved win for Town. They conceded an equaliser with two minutes to go, but grabbed the winner in injury time – shades of us under Keane last year!

So, having bagged one more game (season’s total 92) I set off up the A19 hopeful that number 93 would see an important home win – although I thought that the new man in charge of Rovers would prove a much harder proposition than the self styled Guv’nor.

Read more