Colin Randall

It is time to forget Man City – last week’s apology for a match, and the subsequent Abu Dhabi takeover – and concentrate on laughing at Newcastle United. But Pete Sixsmith‘s enjoyment of the Toon Circus has been marred by crass media coverage..

Never, I thought, would I borrow words from the pen of that uber-Sunderland fan Sir Tim Rice. But I honestly cannot think of anything else to describe the goings on up the road at St James’ Park.

In fact, the word circus is defined in my Collins as meaning “a travelling company of entertainers such as clowns” and as a “public performance given by such a company”.

Well, we have certainly had a public performance despite the fact that neither Mike Ashley nor Kevin Keegan seemed particularly keen to talk to anyone about it.

The group of clowns that we have witnessed have been the “supporters” and the media who have made complete arses of themselves, not in the way they have reported this latest Mag fiasco, but in the over the top way that they have dealt with the self-styled “greatest fans in the world”.

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Pete Sixsmith might have been expected to harrumph a lot about the Abu Dhabi billions heading towards Eastlands. But he sees every chance of the City takeover backfiring and cheekily suggests that my friends here in the Gulf should consider the newly unemployed Mr Keegan as manager…..

I am not quite sure if the Abu Dhabi financed takeover of Manchester City is quite the threat to traditional football that many seem to think.

Like Colin, I go back many years, though not quite as far as the days when SAFC were the Bank of England Club and have seen many clubs taken over by rich owners and spectacularly fail to succeed.

The prerequisite of any Football Club owner is that he (or she) knows something about football or at the very least knows how to let someone manage.

Jack Walker appointed a manager and let him get on with it. He was a rich man and could bankroll players like Shearer and Sherwood but player and team selection was left to Kenny Dalgleish.

So, now that Dr Sulaiman al Fahim is the de facto owner of the Manchester Blues (surely their new name), what does it mean for football in England?

It could be a real nail in the coffin of the idea that you build a team that will challenge for honours. Clearly, there are millions of petro dollars waiting to be spent on footballers who will excite the Eastlands crowd.

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Are we all now going to despise Man City?

Well, I already had it in for them a bit after they trounced us without breaking sweat on Sunday, ruining my trip home from Abu Dhabi.

Next day, of course, I heard the same news as everyone else about the takeover. I would be flying back that night to a city that had suddenly become sky blue.

And City fans are now wondering whether their club, almost as underachieving as ours in modern history, is about to become as hated as Chelsea.

I have given my own answer to this question in a column for Abu Dhabi’s National newspaper today. Read the full article here or settle for this extract:

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Salut! Sunderland has more than once mentioned its gratitude to Peadar O’Sullivan, as Cork as Keano, for the photographs he allows us to use. Up to now these have been the pictures he has taken during Sunderland friendlies in Ireland. More of his work can be found at his own site.
Last Saturday, he came down in the photographic world a little, leaving his expensive camera gear safely locked away and trying his hand with my modest little Lumix. The occasion was my birthday party at the Stadium of Light, and with Peadar’s day job bringing him temporarily to Yorkshire, it seemed a good opportunity to get to shake his hand and have a jar or two in his company.
Peadar has now posted, at the fans’ forum of his own beloved Cork City, this warm and perceptive account of his first visit to the SoL (with only passing reference, thanks heavens, to the debacle he witnessed on his second visit the following day). All the pictures* except the first – of him touching the turf – are his:

I was the guest at a function in the Sunderland Stadium of Light last Saturday and decided to take a game in while I was there.

First impressions of the city were that it had significant disadvantaged areas, but was trying hard to get back on its feet.

As I had arrived early, I decided to wander around and get a feel for the place. Absolutely everyone I met was incredibly polite and friendly.

Even a quick request for directions would incur a detailed response, coupled with a healthy sprinkling of banter.
It’s very unusual to be indentified in England as having a Cork accent, as opposed to an Irish accent, but this revelation lead to an even warmer reception.

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It was a long way to travel to see a display of such glaring ineptitude, and somehow a long way back in the knowledge that a lavish deal had been done from here in Abu Dhabi to buy the club whose good but hardly exceptional team made us look so abysmal on Sunday.

But it was a grand party at the Stadium of Light – mercifully staged, as you’ll have seen from Pete Sixsmith’s most recent Soapbox, the night before the game – and the visit produced a couple of neat coincidences.

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For once the fixture gods are kind, as they rearrange the Manchester City match for after Salut! Sunderland’s (i.e. Colin’s) 60th birthday celebration

The Greeks usually have a word that sums everything up and they most certainly have in this case.
The word is “Hubris” and it means pride or arrogance and describes what happens when you slip from the acceptable one (pride) into the unacceptable one (arrogance).

That’s how I see it this morning, 24 hours after witnessing the most disappointing game of Keane’s reign.
A large group of mostly Sunderland fans had gathered at the Stadium on Saturday evening to celebrate Colin’s 60th birthday with much of the talk revolving around how poor the Mags had been earlier, how Mike “Man of the People” Ashley had looked so ridiculous in his ever tightening shirt, and how he had surely broken numerous rules by chugging a pint in his seat on live TV.

The talk turned to how we had brought in players who would move us onward and upward, how the acquisition of Cissé and Diouf gave us a real cutting edge, how the midfield had speeded up and how the defence looked solid. Colin’s Boro supporting relatives were taunted about how we would pass them in the table after we had dealt with Manchester City, while the Spurs and Leeds fans present were patronised and told to watch this club take off.

Off we went into the night confident that Colin and Joelle would be given another birthday treat by our expensively assembled squad and that he would see a win on his first visit to the Stadium for just over a year.

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You’ve got a lot of nerve………..one of the best opening lines from Bob Dylan, who never played for Sunderland so far as is known but did make himself the absolute hero of one son of Sunderland who became a great success story of his own. The line is taken from his favourite Dylan song.
If Salut! Sunderland announced that it had interviewed a cricket captain with strong Sunderland links, most people would start looking out for the Paul Collingwood feature.
Well, consider the first part of that announced. But it’s not Paul.
Approaches have been made, and – who knows? – the ace Durham County Cricket Club all-rounder and SAFC nut, may one day find time in an incredibly busy life to answer a few questions for us.
In the meantime, we are extremely proud to be able to bring to you Sunderland-born Bob Willis, a giant among England cricketers of the modern age, an in-demand sports broadcaster, Dylan fan extraordinaire – changed his name. for heaven’s sake, to read, in full Robert George Dylan Willis.
Born in Sunderland though he was, on May 30 1949, Bob is sadly not one of us. Not, that is, when one of us means being a Sunderland fan. He is a lifelong supporter of Man City, our opponents on Sunday, save for the first few months of life before he was whisked away to what I always call the north-west Midlands. Let’s face it, a baby in Sunderland would surely know all about its duty to be Red and White through and through, so he cannot have been a Blue then.
No matter, Bob readily agreed at desperately short notice to do a Q&A for this week’s Who Are They? feature. For Salut! Sunderland, it’s comparable to getting Alan Price as a Celebrity Supporter interviewee (and that started out as an interview for Wear Down South, magazine of the London and Southern England branch of the SAFC Supporters’ Association).

So here – once we get the small matter of eight for 43 against the Aussies at Headingley in 1982 out of the way – are Bob’s answers; we cheated a bit and just asked loads of questions (more than for average Q&A, but reaped dividends with Bob on Bert Trautmann, dodgy Blues ownership and the stick-in-the-mud folkies who called Dylan Judas for going electric (did he perhaps have Salut! Live folkies in mind?)…….

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Pete Sixsmith breaks a vow not to set foot in post-Ken, Boris-led London. And is rewarded for his about-turn by a performance that brought not only promise, but also the points…..

A few months ago, I made the rash statement that I would refuse to visit London if they elected Boris The Cad as Mayor. I was ridiculed for this and was told that if I was to maintain any credibility in the eyes of the world I would have to stick to my guns.

Consider the guns unstuck because on Saturday I ventured into Boris’s domain to witness a performance of considerable skill and promise at White Hart Lane.

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Monty and Keano. Joe Baker. Slim Jim Baxter in his less Slim days. Not forgetting Darren Ward, Andy Cole and, of course, the mighty Clough.
The links between Nottingham Forest, our Carling Cup opponents on Wednesday, and Sunderland are strong indeed (though not, thank heavens, so strong that we ever employed Lee Bowyer, as one Forest fan we came a cross thought).
We found Mark Collar* at a livewire Forest fans’ forum Lost That Loving Feeling, where a request for a volunteer to write at Salut! Sunderland has been read, at the last count, almost 700 times (and produced a few candidates). But Mark was first. He’s an English teacher and, commendably, was willing to toil late into the night preparing not only this lovely essay combining nostalgia, despair and hope rekindled but also, we’re sure, a spot of Shakespeare for 5A and some basic work on colons and apostrophes for first formers…..

I grew up in a family that was so Forest it might as well had been a stick of rock with NFFC written through. We had Forest apprentices living in our attic until about 1975, the most famous of whom were Jimmy McIntosh and Terry Cochrane who went on to play for Middlesbrough and Northern Ireland.

My overwhelming memory of Sunderland at that time was the 1973 FA Cup side. An underdog team we all loved – Bob Stokoe, Bobby Kerr, Ian Porterfield. I think this might still be my favourite FA Cup final of all time; seeing as how we only made it once under Cloughie and that did not go well at all.

Anyway. our apprentices moved out in 1975 and Mr Clough moved into the City Ground. It was relatively quiet until we won a trophy called the Anglo-Scottish Cup. Then suddenly we were promoted, League Champions, European Cup winners (twice) and League cup winners about five times.

It was an amazing time to be a Forest fan. John Robertson, who scored the winner in the European Cup Final, used to stand in our front garden to smoke his fag before going out drinking with our lot. Cloughie described him as our “little fat bloke” or something similar. For me he shows what Cloughie could do: a nothing player who suddenly became the best in the world.

We had 18 years of life with Brian before the drink took hold and destroyed him. He built some great sides. I always felt that the 1991 FA Cup Final with Gazza’s terrible lunging tackle and Spurs fight back was his undoing. He chatted with the police rather than the players at the beginning of extra time. He wanted it more than he could show and losing it hurt too much.

Then there were rumours about Cloughie lying in ditches drunk on the way to work. Then there was Cloughie looking terrible and Forest being relegated. For a while, we bounced up and down into the premiership, then we settled into years of Championship football.

Somewhere along the way, there was a game that became my favourite of all time. We went to Peterborough, needing a win to secure promotion. Stuart “Psycho” Pearce was our captain and Stan Collymore was our leading goal scorer. We went two nil down and then Collymore scored an incredible hat-trick to take us up to the Premiership. It was an amazing day.

Then a succession of underachieving managers with poorer and poorer sides conspired to put us down into League 1. Suddenly, for me, five-hour drives to Nottingham would conclude with defeats to teams like Macclesfield or Chester. We had a succession of awful managers and clueless sides. I remember my older brother looking up at me in one game and saying very simply: “We’re not very good anymore.”

Then Colin Calderwood came to the club. At first, most fans felt that he was tactically inept. He was not particularly popular until May last year when, in spite of ourselves, we were promoted automatically. It was a shock to most Forest fans who had thought the club had already died. In the close season, we began signing players the fans had heard of before – Robert Earnshaw and Andy Cole, whom even you may have heard of.

We have had a torrid time with injuries recently and I suspect you will meet us with half the squad missing. The fans have stayed loyal though and even though the City Ground these days looks like a 1980s monument to our former glory, we’ll still give you a good game.

Now for your questions:

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