Colin Randall

Last gasp hero
Picture: Peadar O’Sullivan

At least Anthony Stokes has a sense of humour, with wise cracks about celebrating his long overdue Premiership scoring debut with “a quiet night in”. More of the same – goals, not jokes – and Pete Sixsmith will forgive him all his Glass Spider excesses

Fair play to you, Stokesey

For the last few years I have worn a white shirt and SAFC tie to work after a win. Two years age, the shirt gathered cobwebs in my “wardrobe” while last year the collar and cuffs were frayed as it was worn nearly every Monday from January to April.

So, being the Bertie Wooster of South West Durham I popped along to my tailor (George at Asda) and purchased a new one after the Reading game. Since when it has remained redundant on the clothes rack despite my desperate desire to wear a £6.99 cotton shirt lovingly hand stitched by smiling urchins in Bangladesh.

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Pete Sixsmith goes on the road in search of goals. Unfortunately he finds them in the wrong end.

Colin is wrong. I could think of seven words to describe this shambles but none of them would get past the service provider.

The best way to approach this is to look at the positives of the day. The Globe and The Caernarvon Castle still sell excellent Cains beer, Merseyside taxi drivers still dispense wit and wisdom in equal parts, Goodison Park is still a proper football stadium and Southport is still a most welcoming bolt hole after witnessing a debacle like this.

Had I been a neutral, it would have been a pleasure to watch Everton go about their perfectly legitimate business of taking apart a team so wretched that the Blues fans sat around me were open-mouthed and slack-jawed in disbelief, as they turned it on and we failed to turn up. One guy said: “They’re worse than Tranmere Rovers,” to which his mate replied “Reserves”. An insult to the Prenton Park second team.

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40,000+ celebs
Picture: Texastoast

How dependable is Wikipedia? One answer specific to the nature of the site is that it can only be as reliable as the quality of the information internet users supply.

I turn to it occasionally and am not ashamed, as a professional journalist, to acknowledge that it is often a useful tool. And if I use it, I credit it. But as with all information found on the web, indeed information from any source about which you are not 100 per cent sure, it is best to proceed with caution when making use of what the tool yields.

In the case of the Sunderland AFC page, there are glaring errors and omissions in the list of well known supporters, mistakes that seem all the more bizarre given how much Wikipedia has occasionally dipped into the Celebrity Supporters archives of Salut! Sunderland for its own source material (usually without crediting it to me beyond links from text, plus what I have added myself).

This, then, is the Wikipedia list** of celebrities who support SAFC:

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Wanted: performances like this
Picture: db1874

How many of us uttered the words of the headline at the weekend. And how many blamed Craig Gordon? Pete Sixsmith springs to his defence

Let’s deal with the Milner equaliser first. One of the students at the school where I teach at summed it up perfectly.

“We could have stopped that goal”, he said, “but I’m not sure that we should have”. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings……

I thought Gordon was unlucky in that he was expecting a challenge or an interception, and I think that he had put his weight on the other foot in order to block either a deflection or a shot from the far post.

This, I know, sounds as if I’m scratching around for an excuse.

Some fans are having doubts about Craig Gordon. But he’s a good keeper. Stick with him – he’ll save us points.

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Courage or folly?
Picture: dgolfrabbit

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.

Big Jim is American, a teacher at one of the USAF bases, Lakenheath or Mildenhall. He and his lady friend, Virginia, are devotees of the arts and had resolved before coming to the UK to wring every last drop of culture from their stay.

They became Friends of the Tate, Friends of Wigmore Hall, friends of anything that would bring them preferential or cut price tickets for classical concerts and exhibitions on visits to London. They’d often invite us, once or twice picking up the meal bill for good measure.

How to pay back their kindnesses? “What would you say,” I asked Jim, more than a little apprehensive about his likely reaction to the lowbrow treat I had in mind, “if I could get tickets for the Sunderland end at Newcastle?”

“You bet,” came the reply like a shot.

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Early Irish support for the Lads?
Picture: Free Stater

Malignant fate. That, I seem to recall, is how one Sunderland supporter explained his lifelong support. What he meant was that he had no choice in the small matter of where he was born.

Not all Sunderland fans were born on Wearside. County Durham, the Tyne Valley, even Tyneside are all part of the vast immediate catchment area and even then the story is barely half told.

There are the sons and daughters of Sunderland and other North Eastern folk who’ve moved away and the people who were born elsewhere and later drifted towards the region. And what about the Sunderland through-and-through lass who gives birth at Newcastle Royal Infirmary? Or the legion of Irish supporters attracted by one or both of the Keano/Quinn magnets?

In truth, I am a Durham lad only in the sense that Eamon de Valera was Irish. Most people probably assumed he was a native Irishman whereas he was born in New York and had a Spanish father. I took my first breath in Sussex and my parents were Londoners. But there was plenty of Mackem & Mag blood in the family, and territorial links from Ryhope to Byker, Tynemouth to Wallsend. And I was brought to Shildon a few months into my life.

It doesn’t make me any less a Sunderland supporter that I didn’t emerge from the womb in Southwick or Seaham. My own 45-year allegiance had simple, traditional origins; my dad took me to see them play, Brian Clough scoring our winner at Boro, and I was hooked for life. It was great experience, even if I had to struggle to see what was going on from my place in a crowded Ayresome Park, and it is perhaps no wonder that I couldn’t wait for more.

In the case of Andy Nichol, author of the post-Man City analysis headlined Man for man marking after another wasted opportunity, the wonder is that his first experience of SAFC didn’t make him give up any idea of being a football fan at all.

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Last night seemed a watershed of sorts, and it was difficult to pass it and remain in upbeat mood. Pete Sixsmith adds his own thoughts to Andy Nichol’s excellent analysis

Thank you, Setanta.

At the end of this feast of football, I breathed a sigh of relief. Not at the result, because that left me feeling deflated, but because I had avoided spending in excess of £50 to watch what can best be described as a load of old rubbish.

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Daryl Murphy: “annoying”
All pictures: Peadar O’Sullivan

The Blackcats forum achieves a consistently high standard of debate on the ups and – more commonly – downs of supporting Sunderland. After yet another disappointing failure to turn possession and long periods of ascendancy into results, ANDY NICHOL* offered this candid man-to-man assessment…….the marks out of 10 are Salut! Sunderland’s

So, so frustrating to watch. We took the pace out of the game very effectively and stopped Citeh from playing.

……but when we had the chance to inject pace of our own we were embarrasingly lacking. We had several golden opportunites to play killer balls/put players in on goal but Stokes, Etuhu and Jones (that I can remember) were all guilty of a worrying lack of vision/speed of thought.

And they’re not alone – while we seem comfortable knocking the ball around in slow motion, it’ll take much much more if we’re to have any chance of climbing this league.

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