Colin Randall 
Do we know owt about football?
That’s what I asked a couple of years ago, when I was comparing a pre-season poll with end-of season positions. And that’s more or less what the Mrs said when I showed her the graph I’d done to compare the current championship placings with our readers’ pre-season expectations.
Just as the last time, the expectation is nothing like the reality, although it must be said that this time around it’s still early days.
As I write, with a few hours to go, the transfer window has been a damp squib for Sunderland.
Maybe we’ll get Ross McCormack from Aston Villa. Maybe we won’t. Maybe there’ll be other signings, the timing smacking of desperation, the likely cost making us look a little League Two-ish.
Papy Djilobodji is confirmed as Dijon-bound on loan. Wahbi Khazri may end up leaving, too, also for a team, Rennes, that will be scrapping in or around the French Ligue 1 relegation zone. So much the better. If Kone goes too, I’ll shed few tears.
But again as I write, I don’t know who is going, other than the fairly useless Papy, and who may be coming.
Monsieur Salut writes: my friend and mentor Mike Amos, as good a journalist as the North East has produced, wrote in the Northern Echo a few years back about a Boro player who’d sup pints with the fans before a game, get the bus with them to Ayresome Park and then play his heart out, scoring a few goals in the process.
These days, he’d park his Porsche at the ground early, lower his head – earphones embedded – at any autograph-hunter’s approach and join team mates for a light pasta or salad before going out in hopes of impressing someone in the stands scouting for a bigger club able to pay bigger wages. And plenty of the fans would be making their way back after the match to comfortable homes in suburbia.
Cynical or true? In a survey of fans’ changing perceptions of the game for http://www.ticketgum.com/, attending football emerges as much less a working class pursuit than in the past with good and bad aspects of that evolution. Women are increasingly present, violence around the grounds is on the wane but it’s all become a little more gentrified. But is going to football really a better experience these days, as a big majority of those polled believe? I reproduce a slightly edited version of the article supplied, complete with a few asides of my own.
One health warning: I was involved a little in opinion polls when I worked for The Daily Telegraph and 486 strikes me as a rather small sample. But it’s an interesting talking point, especially for older supporters …
Monsieur Salut writes: when Pete Sixsmith suggested a series looking at his first encounters with Sunderland’s opposing teams or their grounds, I had minor doubts. That’s 46 articles plus the cup games – assuming he does each team for home games, each ground for away ties – on top of all else he contributes to Salut! Sunderland.
It’s fair to say the first fruits of Sixer’s latest endeavours are making me eat my thoughts. It is proving a fabulous series, much admired here but also by supporters of the clubs he writes about. Eric Bowers recently described Sixer as a national institution … you decide
The story so far is enough to persuade me that he should really be talking to book publishers. Here’s a flavour (click the team name to see the full piece in each case):
John McCormick writes: it’s getting near to the point where I’ll be getting to a game or two. My Preston ticket’s already sorted and now we have Everton in that carathingy cup, whatever it’s called. You know, the one where draws take place on another part of the planet, and over a timespan that a geologist might recognise.
But do I want to go after yesterday’s shambles? Like you, I’ll have to read Pete Sixsmith’s match report to see if there’s anything to salvage.
For the first time in ages – especially away – we had more possession than our opponents, yet we were hammered. There has to be a message in that, for our players, for our manager and, above all, for our owner.
But it’s still early days yet and perhaps the next week will see changes. Paul Summerside, over on our facebook page, doesn’t think we’ll get new players but, according to Pete Sixsmith’s seven word summary, drastic action is needed, and quickly.
John McCormick writes: I’m setting this up on Tuesday, as the Northwest News is carrying an article about the ‘Northern Powerhouse’. ‘As if,’ I’m thinking.
There’s a dearth of funding, in contrast to the money spent on crossrail, so travel between cities like Newcastle, Hull and Liverpool isn’t going to improve before I stop going to matches. And it’s worse for all of the satellites outside the big cities. Yet football fans, ours especially, will still go to towns in Cumbria, Lancs and Yorks (and farther south) – to places which have their own football communities and often wider histories which the south would do well to remember.
And with that in mind, here’s Pete Sixsmith to remind you of some of that history.
Today he turns his hand to Barnsley, probably originating in Anglo-Saxon times (hence the “ley”), mentioned in the Domesday book and with a venerable football club which has done more than many may think, including FA and League cups and a short spell in what we now call the Premier League …
After the worst campaign in recent memory for Sunderland fans, the rebuilding job has begun at the Stadium of Light this season as they dip into the Championship for the first time in just over a decade.
Simon Grayson picked up his first win of the season with a 3-1 win at Norwich after an opening weekend draw with promotion tipped Gary Rowett and his Derby County side, but have yet to win since. The last time the Black Cats dropped to the second tier it was an instant return to the top flight, winning the Championship with a stunning 17 game unbeaten run after the turn of the year.
It may never have been quite like watching Brazil. But fans of big clubs can have no real concept of what it means to be part of the sort of occasion that gripped Dan Tate 14 months ago. As part of a 51,000-strong crowd, Dan experienced a great afternoon in the history of his club. He had willed himself to believe in a playoff final victory whoever his team, Barnsley, came up against and so it proved. Barnsley 3 Millwall 1 after a comfortable dismissal of Walsall in each leg of the League One semi-final. Dan is a season ticket holder at Oakwell and needless to say, will be there when Sunderland visit on Saturday. He ‘diplomatically’ predicts a draw …
As Paul Summerside put it here earlier this week, Saturday’s game at Oakwell is a much more important test of Simon Grayson’s Sunderland than a 2nd league cup tie could ever be.
The result will not determine the course of our season. But the psychological impact of a good one, which means three points not one, would be huge. A bad does not bear thinking about, even this early in the season.