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AFC Wimbledon Guess the Score: giantkillers at Sunderland after slaying West Ham

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Jake: ‘don’t let them think beating West Ham means owt’

Another game, another prize Guess the Score. Be first to be right, have a UK delivery address and – whoever you support – you will win the mug (a Wimbledon or neutral winner would be found something suitable).

We need to start winning again and we probably didn’t need Wimbledon to have a morale-boosting FA Cup victory over West Ham United.

But in a spirit of friendship, we hand over the rest of this edition of the competition to Gary Jordan*, one of several Wimbledon supporters who responded to a plea for help with the Who are You? interview.

Gary, covering NFL at Wembley

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The League One breakaway: Peterborough dent Charlton’s progress

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Part one of our mid-season review looked forward to the Christmas games.

Part two looked at what had happened up to New Year’s Day.

Part three was delayed until yesterday, and I’m taking the time to update that post after yesterday’s results. The first part of this one is the same as yesterday, given that we didn’t play. It’s the discussion   of the breakaway group that has changed:

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Josh Maja: fall-out and falling out as Bordeaux uncorks its cheeky new red

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Monsieur Salut writes: the club’s statement on the completion of Josh Maja’s move to Bordeaux was short and uninformative. We awaited some thanks, either way. They came belatedly from Maja and we should give him the benefit of the doubt and accept them at face value as being his own sentiments, not some old dross churned out by his agent(s). Social media being what it is, the response has been mostly unforgiving and mostly unappealing …

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Portsmouth, Luton, Barnsley and Sunderland, plus Charlton – the League One breakaway group?

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Part one of  our mid-season review looked forward to the Christmas games.

Part two looked at what had happened up to New Year’s Day.

Part three was meant to go out after the Luton game. Repetitive strain injury decided otherwise and I still have to take care so here’s what I’ve managed, with a focus on a couple of comments I made towards the end of that second part:

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Rate the Ref: And the worst by far is….

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MONSIEUR SALUT writes: the series has been an interesting exercise but will now be discontinued for the reasons set out below. Our thanks to Ken Gambles for the idea and Salut! Sunderland’s associate editor John McCormick for making it work

John McCormick writes: I have to include a warning right from the outset. Some of the judgements below are dodgier than even the dodgiest of McCormick’s dodgy numbers. The arithmetic’s correct, as always, and I removed the Accrington ratings because of the abandonment, but some games – away games especially – had low numbers of responses and that brings into question the reliability of our findings. For example, removing the one person who gave Craig Hicks (Scunthorpe Utd away) a Coote-like 1 would have increased the rating for that particular ref from 6.14 to 6.54.

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Sunderland home kits: the good, the acceptable and the downright ugly history

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Thomas MM Henry’s famous painting, SAFC vs Aston Villa 1895. Red and white stripes, well, because it’s (nearly) always been that way!

Matthew Warburton, writer and Sunderland fan, looks back at the striped but also – figuratively – chequered history of the SAFC home kit …

Sunderland AFC have been around for a long time; since 1879, as any properly educated schoolboy would tell you.

As fans, we’re quite proud to say that the home kit hasn’t changed too much since the early days of the club’s history. Although the first few seasons the team wore navy blue, since 1884, it’s all been about the red and white. Here we look back through time at Sunderland’s home kit.

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Sixer’s Manchester City Seven: one step from Wembley

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Jake: ‘not so silly a cup after all’

As Salut! Sunderland‘s tweet put it, this was game that would take us one step from Wembley if we won, but didn’t really matter if we lost since it’s a Mickey Mouse competition anyway. In the event, Pete Sixsmith and our deputy editor Malcolm Dawson were there to witness a good win. So the Checkatrade is important after all. Watmore could you want than one goal? Another, from Gooch. One of the Salut team will be writing about the match at greater length. This is the place for the instant verdict, preceded by an asterisk if someone other than Sixer proves the seven-word summing-up …

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