Colin Randall

Diamond White, aka Paxton Lee*, leapt at the chance of writing for Salut! Sunderland‘s new Who Are They? feature ahead of Saturday’s game at White Hart Lane. Will we extend our run of one win running? Will we snatch a plucky draw? Or will we just continue this season’s normal away service of losing most things in sight? Paxton thinks he knows the answer

Let’s not pretend otherwise, for us this week is all about the League Cup Semi-final 2nd leg against the Woolwich Wanderers.

We haven’t beaten them for years and we are a game away from Wembley. However, we would be foolish to underestimate the importance of Saturday’s affair with Sunderland. One look at the league table will show you that an away win would see Sunderland within one point of us.

Read more

Sunderland fans would settle for a controversial win on the lines of a 1938 FA Cup tie clinched by a Raich carter goal. Logan Holmes* and his fellow Spurs supporters want Berbatov to emulate the scoring record Jimmy Greaves (pictured) had against us

Saturday’s game at White Hart Lane will be the 100th competitive meeting between Spurs and Sunderland with Tottenham holding a slight advantage in the overall record: 38 wins ahead of Sunderland’s 35.

Throughout that record, Sunderland have a history of spoiling Spurs’ hopes and ambitions.

Back in 1938 – no, I wasn’t there – Sunderland travelled to London for an FA Cup 6th round tie. Sunderland were the 1st Division side and the FA Cup holders while Spurs had dropped down into the 2nd Division three years earlier.

White Hart Lane recorded the highest ever attendance – 75,038 were packed into the ground as the players took to the pitch. Such a scenario, a record crowd, deserved a home win but Sunderland had other ideas; however their victory was not without controversy.

Read more

Thanks to all you Spurs fans. Thanks even more if you recognise our greater need for points (just now) and grant us an away win on condition you still finish much higher.

The response to my launch of Who Are They? has been tremendous, with articles lined up for future games and a great bunch of postings for more immediate use.

Sappers’s witty offering is already up there and further pieces from Logan Holmes and “Paxton Lee” will appear over the next 24 hours, with yet another, from Greg Meyer, also promised.

I will find a way of making the multiple Spurs pieces easily viewable without cluttering up the main postings column. If I can. But with mentions of Raich Carter, Chris Waddle, Paul Stewart, Jimmy Greaves and Ben Alnwick to come, it’s worth sticking around whatever my struggles with blogosphere technology.

With the exception of my very good friend David Sapsted’s words, already posted, these items appear thanks to Jim Duggan, who runs the Topspurs site. And no sooner had I thanked Jim for being such a gent than this arrived (from Jim):

Read more

See also: A tale of two Keanes
What Kevin Ball did with the goal at his mercy
That’s 100 competitive games between SAFC &s Spurs

**************************************************************************

Sunderland beating Spurs in the first game of the season was the last thing Londoncentric sports writers expected. Weren’t Tottenham going to be one of the big performers this season? David Sapsted – Sappers to his pals – certainly thought so

CAST your mind back to last August, if you will. There was a foot and mouth outbreak in Surrey, fires raging across southern California and – as ever at that time of year – the pulses of Spurs fans were racing notably faster than normal.

The 2007-8 season, we told ourselves, was going to be the one when we finally fulfilled all that promise…our team of perpetual under-achievers (only thwarted, if you recall, from a place in the Champions’ League a few months earlier by some dodgy lasagne on the eve of the crucial West Ham game) were going to come good at last.

No doubt about it. Absolutely none. We were all supremely confident and, for the first time in a lot of years, had good cause to be so.

Read more

One dictionary definition of magpie is “idle chatterer”. That probably sums up Kevin Keegan quite well. But Pete Sixsmith, writing before news broke that the circus was coming back to toon, found plenty for scope for fun at the expense of KK’s long line of predecessors

There’s a classic Fawlty Towers moment when Basil is having a dialogue with O’Reilly, the useless Irish builder, and O’Reilly says to Fawlty: “Calm down, Mr Fawlty. There’s always someone who’s worse off than you.” Basil replies “Is there? Well, I’d like to meet him, I could do with a good laugh.”

Now, things are not great for us. We are in our traditional relegation place, some of the players we have brought in this summer are clearly not good enough and there are a few people beginning to have doubts about the manager. But there at least 50,000 worse off than us and they are all wearing Black and White as the Great Mag Fiasco Show rides into town again.

For here is a club for which the word Fiasco might have been invented. The owner thinks he is a fan and wears a (Sports Direct bought) shirt to prove it. But he isn’t really; he’s from deepest Manchester United territory – Hertfordshire.

The chairman looks like someone who has wandered in from the accountant’s office and been given the job of speaking for his reclusive master without having any ideas of his own. The late lamented manager had an issue with the BBC, had never won anything in the top flight and played a brand of football that was an anathema to the cultured, educated shirt twirlers who make up the crowd. So he has to go.

Read more

Sing when you’re winning? Win when you’re singing more like. It was a good enough philosophy for FDR and Pete Sixsmith reckons it’s good enough for us

The greatest of all US presidents, Franklin D Roosevelt, was also the first to have a campaign song.

Because of the Great Depression he wanted it to be positive. So he chose Happy days are here again; wherever he went, it was played.

As a result, he won four elections, which is one less than the number of wins we have had this season, so maybe Roy is better than FDR.

There are a lot of similarities between the two; both liked dogs, both have three initials and er…. well, you get the picture. Having said that, I wouldn’t fancy FDR picking the right team for a relegation scrap at the Reebok in April.

What a good weekend for Sunderland fans.
Fulham lost again on Saturday afternoon and the other results could have been a lot worse. Then came Old Trafford and a display of such mind blowing garbage from the Mags that you almost felt sorry for the foot soldiers of the Toon Army – until, that is, you saw the overfed, underbrained ones taking their hideous shirts off and twirling them round their heads.

It was all set up for Sunday. Redknapp showed consummate common sense in staying at Pompey rather than moving north and being sacked six months later because he was not entertaining enough.

Obviously he couldn’t ride a unicycle and juggle at the same time. It reminds me of a mate at college who went to see Leonard Cohen at the City Hall but didn’t enjoy him “because he wasn’t versatile enough”.

Read more

From the Ready to Go site, familiar territory to most Sunderland fans, comes two pieces of unrelated news.

The first is that the SMB (Sunderland Message Board) and Speakeasy Chatroom, sources of good lively debate but also outbursts of offensive drivel, have been shut down.

The explanatory message read simply: “Closed due to libellous posts. Hopefully back later but don’t hold your breath.”

The people responsible for depriving hundreds if not thousands of SAFC supporters of access to these forums know who they are, and how they forced the hands of Roger and his colleagues at RTG. The sheer effort put into running the site deserved better**.

But the other piece of news put the first (a minor inconvenience when all is said and done) in the shade. Hazey, well known to RTG subscribers as the man behind the spectacularly misnamed Dull Ramblings blog, had lost his spirited but unevenly matched battle with cancer.

Read more