In the early evening sunshine two men pulled up, one behind the other, on the quayside at Dover.
Both wore gallows expressions as they stepped from their cars to stretch legs while waiting to board the Calais-bound ferry.
One had taken off his 1937 replica Cup Final top and it lay along the back shelf of his car; the other still had on his gold away shirt, in which colour we had two or three hours earlier lost that momentous playoff final against Charlton.
The weekend looms with no Sunderland game to watch, hear, look out for, etc……..and England need to win in Israel. …
Do we all live in a Gary Rowell world?
Loads of Sunderland’s more vocal supporters certainly do, and so does the woman who now holds the No 1 position at Radio 2, a station that is unquestionably a success story at a time when not all things BBC are success stories. And, as you will discover as you read on, she has just been promoted again.
But let’s dwell on football for now. As Wear Down South was able to reveal back in 2003, Gary is one of two heroes in Lesley Douglas’s life.
The other is some bloke called Bruce Springsteen. Meeting him was a doddle. She is far less sure how she’d cope if she suddenly found herself being introduced to Lord Rowell of Seaham. Bruce may have a lot going for him, but he will never score a hat trick against the Mags.
(Heavy brackets time). Salut! Sunderland‘s record of getting answers from the BBC is not great, but we may yet find that she has met and become a firm friend of GR since the interview of so long ago. Watch this space.
It was a great feeling to be in the automatic promotion spots, short-lived as it proved to be.
Second top for a couple of weeks during the layoff caused by one of those outbreaks of much less interesting football – internationals – would have been rather nice. Birmingham’s late equaliser at West Brom put paid to that.
Realistically, with Brum starting yesterday with two games in hand and level on points, we should be grateful that they dropped two.
There is no point in pretending that 2-2 at home to Stoke at this stage of the promotion battle was anything other than a bitterly disappointing result.
This time, however, we were lucky. Only Preston among our promotion rivals won and we remain third top, just three points behind Birmingham and Derby, teams we have recently played well against.
And the simple fact is that teams by and large do not win all their games. Football would have little purpose if they did.
It’s bad enough that the Premiership big guns more or less believe they have God-given rights to one victory after another. Who could forget the blasé, another-day-at-the-office looks on the faces of Liverpool fans after they beat us in the 1992 FA Cup Final?
Sunderland folklore has it that Roy Greenwood, who was nearly a very good left winger for us, screwed up a chance to join Arsenal because, if I remember it correctly, he missed the train to London for his medical.
Leaving aside the issue of why he would want to move to a smaller club in the first place, I should say that the story may not be true. I have come across his sister during my career (she is also a journalist), and she insists that it is not.
No doubt seems to exist in the cases of Anthony Stokes, Marlon Fulop and Tobias Hysen, all left behind in the North East on Friday when they failed to turn up in time for the team coach for Barnsley*.
Roy Keane – don’t you just warm to everything he has done since coming to the SoL? – said he’d warned players repeatedly about timekeeping and had decided “a line had to be drawn”.
* See the goals by reading on………
Top writer, lyricist and broadcaster that he is, Sir Tim Rice has won plenty of plaudits and awards.For his real career break, however, he was chosen as the very first subject in the series of Celebrity Supporter interviews for 5573, the magazine of the London branch of the SAFC supporters’ association (later renamed Wear Down South).
As I pointed out at the time, near the end of 2000, Tim had an important quality in common with others who follow Sunderland: he can hardly be called a glory seeker.
The interview with the man who, as the composing partner of Andrew Lloyd Webber, created Evita, took place in exciting times – the second of our seventh top Premiership seasons.
But Tim* is no fair weather or bandwagon-jumping fan; he has been fond of Sunderland since boyhood.
* With 5573‘s unrivalled access to the stars, first name terms came naturally….I am renewing contact with Tim and will update this posting if he gets back with more news of his life as a supporter, though Wikipedia reports that he was awarded a honorary doctorate by Sunderland Uni at a ceremony at the SoL in Nov 2006 and was named a Disney Legend in 2002.
Let us hope that by about twenty past three this coming Saturday, as the referee blows the final whistle after the early fixture at Barnsley, those of us following events on radio will be treated to a happy-sounding Gary Bennett.
Bennett was always my kind of player when he wore red and white: whole-hearted, fearless and able to show real skill and vision as well as a capacity for solid hard work.
* Heavily modified post taking account of disappointing – for us – result of Norwich v Derby.
The 2-1 victory over WBA doesn’t move us up from fourth place but was a momentous win with goals from …
It’s what the French call gagnant gagnant, a win-win situation for Salut! Sunderland.
Either the matchday programme for SAFC v Derby County put on sales because I tipped off readers that I’d written an article for it, enabling me to claim credit for the circulation rise. Or sales slipped because you boycotted it, having heard that the mean-spirited bods who stalk the corridors of power at the Red and White programme HQ had refused to print the tiniest reference to this blog.But I jest.
As I admitted when R&W somewhat belatedly gave a firm No to a request I thought they had already granted, I am so daft about the club that I’d have written the piece for them anyway.If you missed it, and have a soft spot for other people’s hard luck stories, read on. You’ll learn about a Big Match day out that sticks nastily in the memory for members of the London branch of the SAFC Supporters’ Association.
It is bad enough being dumped out of the FA Cup after reaching the 2004 semi-finals and a game against Millwall that we all expect to win.
But you know it’s not your day when you are then dumped in the mud near Derby – sorry, County fans, nothing personal about the location – on your way home.
