Celebrity supporters: Tasmin, Salut! and a 50,000 milestone

Tasmin

Salut! Sunderland‘s statistics for hits – the number of visits paid to the site – are all over the place.

It says 80,000+ somewhere on here, but that may be because some of the traffic towards one of my other sites has somehow been bolted on. From checking Statcounter, whose services I use, I believe the truer figure is 50,000 (or 50,401 as I started writing, if you want precision).

So we’ve passed the Stadium of Light capacity. That still leaves us poor relations of A Love Supreme online, Ready to Go, the club’s official site and, probably, various other corners of the web where Sunderland fans congregate. But it’s not a bad effort all the same.

What took us past the 50,000 mark, in some style, with almost 700 hits yesterday? A stream of fans eager to devour Pete Sixsmith’s perceptive good-and-bad assessment of the season? My own musings on Leeds v Doncaster? The welcome plug in the new edition of ALS?

Er, no. Step forward, instead, Tasmin Archer, “sol51” and the power of Ready to Go.

Every so often, someone at the SMB or Pure Football forums at RSG resurrects the familiar question of which celebrities support SAFC – and which of those, assumed to be fellow fans, do not.

Invariably, a supporter new to the topic pops up to doubt the authenticity of some fans of renown. Kate Adie, Tim Rice and even, in one bizarre thread, Steve Cram are examples. All have been interviewed here. Or s/he advances the names of people who are not and never have been among our fans.

It hardly helps that apparently respectable websites have been known to list Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys) for example, or Patrick Stewart (Capt Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek), despite conclusive findings, not least as Salut! Sunderland, that they are not Red and Whites.

But Tasmin is. Anyone who reads this site knows that, since we interviewed her a year or so ago. But not all SAFC folk come anywhere near here, so this week’s SMB thread had a familiar ring, a subscriber called Weremuthe posting the following message:

her that sang Sleeping Satellite – No 1 in the best gems of the 90’s last night, said she’d done nowt since but is a ST holder at the Sol. Does anyone see her at the Sol?

Herocially, so far as we are concerned since it is nice to be back in the top 100 of the Soccer Links Hit List, “sol51” added a ink to our interview. No one corrected the poor girl’s name (the thread still calls her Tamsin) but you cannot have everything.

The last time the subject cropped up, I posted a list of the Salut! Sunderland celebrity supporter interviews, all readily available down the lefthand sidebar, and said that while I had certainly missed out on one or two names, this was was probably as comprehensive a line-up as anyone had produced.

Someone else wrote in saying he’d never heard of half of these “stars”. I am sorry, but also reminded of the Mrs Richards sketch in Fawlty Towers, when Basil chides her for expecting to see the Sydney Opera House, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or herds of wildebeest when looking out of a Torquay hotel window.

I’d love to be able to add megastars and world leaders to the list and bring to you their memories of following the Lads through thick and thin, from the lows of being squashed into the away end at Bradford and the highs of watching us win 5-0 at Luton to go up as champions.

Requests are therefore going in to Mick Jagger, Brad Pitt, Madonna, the Queen and Barack Obama. But for the moment, we’re stuck with the delightful Tasmin, and the other moderately well known people who actually do follow our club – oh, and thanks for your “linkypoo” sol51!

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