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Whatever the reason, they show little interest in engaging in friendly banter with Salut! Sunderland. The response to our approaches varies:

* I’m off on a cruise and far, far too busy anyway

* Yeah ok. How much you going to pay me. My paypal address is available to you for a tenna

* F*** off you twat

We are being unfair, but only just. Julian Boodell wrote a long, detailed and much appreciated preview of the game at the Britannia earlier in the season. The cruiser was instrumental in getting him to do it, though the tone of the latest rejection suggests she wishes to receive no further approaches should we still be playing each other next season.

But then Stoke City have a long history of stonewalling. They invented the boring, defensive, all we want is a point game – or so it seemed to Pete and me back in 1963, when they came to Roker Park for a draw and got it (our dropped point making them Division 2 champions and keeping us down).

So yes, that was the long way of saying we could entice no Stoke fan to preview the game at the SoL on Saturday. Julian and the cruiser did try to find us one fellow fan apiece, without luck, and Julian offered this cheering thought: “Happy to do it next season if our paths cross! I think we will both be in the Prem. West Brom Pompey and The Bar codes to go down.”

Deprived of a preview for the first time since this series was launched in the middle of last season, Salut! Sunderland has chosen to wind the clock back to 2001. Below you will find a little of the excellent article Stephen Foster, author of She Stood There Laughing and pictured above, wrote in The Guardian about his lifelong support of what were then a bunch of hopeless losers:

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Can anyone be blamed for not bothering with last night’s FA Cup 4th round replay at Ewood Park? When he read Ricky Sbragia’s pre-match threat to send out a “weakened side”, Pete Sixsmith probably felt he’d seen enough of the reserves already, and without having to cross the Pennines in winter. Let alone seen enough of Blackburn. As a result, he says, Soapbox will be “not very insightful”. But read on; absence has merely made his art grow stronger……

Having declined to make the journey to Blackburn, I listened to the game courtesy of BBC Radio Newcastle.

Being a renaissance man, I did the ironing, thumbed through The Guardian, read a book and half watched that dire Everton vs Liverpool game on TV (would have been interesting to hear how ITV tried to talk up that dross) while concentrating on the news from Ewood Park.

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Realistic or deeply disappointing? Does it mean Ricky Sbragia actually wants us to be kicked out tonight, even though the draw for the fifth round – Coventry at home – gives us a massive chance of reaching the quarter finals? Does it matter if that’s the case?

Are we so much under threat of relegation that Stoke at home is our cup final? And perhaps worst of all, is Ricky talking down the cup and talking up the Stoke game in such a way that we lose tonight because we don’t care, and fail on Saturday because the pressure on the players will be overwhelming?

This is what Ricky told BBC Radio Newcastle about tonight’s replay at Blackburn:

“In general, I’m going to play a lot of the squad players and I might hand a couple of debuts to the younger players because we’ve got a massive game against Stoke on Saturday,” he said.

“I don’t know what Sam [Allardyce] is going to do but in my point of view I’ll be going down to Blackburn with a weakened team.”

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This posting started out as a simple desire to maintain tradition. Stoke fans are making us sweat for later in the week, but Salut! Sunderland has managed to find an opposing fan for every forthcoming game since we launched the Who Are They? feature in the middle of last season. This season, that has meant finding five Blackburn Rovers fans, Mike Delap*, to his relief and ours, is the last one. There HAS to be a result tomorrow night. Doesn’t there? Well, yes, but there has to be a game first. If it’s called off, this preview/commentary on our two clubs will be withdrawn and wheeled out again when the time comes. Thank you, Mike, pictured (right, with his best mate Luke Johnson on the left, with his father-in-law Ian Futter), and for being a Geordie’s son who cannot stomach the Mags. Salut! Sunderland readers should check out the Vital Blackburn site, where Mike is a regular contributor. And let us hope you are right in saying we’ll be playing each other all over again next season and in the Premier…

That’s one win apiece, two draws and now there has to be a decider! At least we won’t see each other again this season – how will this one go?

Can I start by saying that I am absolutely sick of the sight of Sunderland this season! It’s not that I dislike Sunderland, in fact I have no grudges at all (for grudges please see: Hotspur, Tottenham and United, West Ham) but the fact we are about to play you for the 5th time this season is frankly crazy!

All the games have been tight tense affairs and it is a show that the teams are evenly matched this season. As for the “decider” as we are at home and I am an optimist at heart, I am going to go for a blue and white army win, if you were to hold a gun to my head (please don’t) I would say a 2-0 victory with McCarthy and Pedersen scoring.

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From his snowy encampment in Shildon, Pete Sixsmith assesses the great letdown that was the second half at St James’ Park. He clears everyone – especially Chopra and Howard Webb – of conspiracy, and admits that we didn’t in the end deserve the three points that were so comfortably in our grasp at half time. Forget Joe Kinnear’s idiotic bombast, forgive Webb for a decision even he must now see as lamentable and back the Lads to go on and reach round five and thrash Stoke City….

Right, let’s get an assessment of the game out of the way first before I start on Howard Webb and the Premier League refereeing fraternity.

It was an exciting game with lots of committment, heavy tackles, near misses and fascinating sub plots. It was the kind of game that typifies English football at its most raw and it was perfect local derby fare, – with a fair result at the end.

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Pete Sixsmith goes undercover to venture behind enemy lines. Did he survive? Read on… .

The time is 10.30 and I am ensconced in a safe house in Dunston, awaiting the right time to set off on the most dangerous part of my mission, ie infiltrate the Toon.

I drove up the motorway having taken anything that suggested that I was one of the chosen people out of my car. Pretending to be a Mag, I slumped over the wheel with my prosthetic beer belly resting on the dashboard and a look of pain and misery in my dull,downcast eyes.

I remember being told that the best thing to do is to blend in with the locals and not stand out.

As it is Sunday morning and most sound and responsible English people will be heading for church, I have decided to enter the enemy stronghold dressed as a typical middle class Englishman.

Believe me, getting the spats, the frock coat and the bowler hat took a while but now that I am actually in them, I will obviously blend in and my appearance will hardly raise a glance as I stroll up Pink Lane, past Bob Monkhouse’s old night club and into The Strawberry for a pre game snifter.

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On March 4 1967, having already beat Newcastle United 3-0 at St James’ Park back in October, with goals from George Mulhall, Neil Martin and John O’Hare, we did the same at home, Bobby Kerr grabbing two and Mulhall the other. The team was Montgomery, Irwin, Harvey, Todd, Kinnell, Baxter, Kerr, O’Hare, Martin, Herd, Mulhall. Today, we have – theoretically – one of our best chances of doing the double over the Mags in the 42 years that have passed since then. By the time many Salut! Sunderland readers see Pete Sixsmith‘s preview, we will know which SAFC put in an appearance today: the one that can win an away game 4-1 or sneak a deserved 2-1; the one that scrapes a draw; or the one that inflicts yet more disaapointment on the fans….Ha’way the Lads

Well, here I am lurking behind enemy lines trying to get a fix on the “Big Match” tomorrow. Have spent the afternoon in a strange town called Ashington where the natives speak in incomprehensible accents and make utterances abour “gannin’ doon the toon to see off the Mackems tha kna’s”.

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Paul McMillan would call it an abuse of executive power. To me, it was a routine exchange between newspaper pros. Dec 4 2008, as all Sunderland fans know and Newcastle fans pretend to have forgotten, was the eve of a momentous occasion: the 100th anniversary of our 9-1 win at St James’ Park in what was a Toon championship season.
I had written a restrained, objective piece about the centenary for the sports pages of The National, and was second into the office that morning. Paul, who works for the online edition, was first. Noticing that my article seemed to be nowhere on The National’s website, I made my first decision of the day and asked Paul to put it there. My request, of course, had no more to do with partisan sentiment than his compliance smacked of cap-doffing by a downtrodden worker. I acted for the greater good of the paper.
And in time, whatever he felt, Paul forgave me. When I asked him to write about the coming weekend’s Tyne-Wear derby, he agreed like a shot. It was his chance for revenge.
You saw the first instalment here; here’s the second, his answers to our questions……

What on earth do you make of events at St James’ Park this season? Fun for Sunderland, a mystery to neutrals, but must be humiliating for Mags…

Watching Newcastle has always been compared to a soap opera. But this season we’ve been more Crossroads than Coronation Street.

It’s been clueless from top to bottom.
I did not have high hopes at the start of the season and have had to lower my expectations with almost every game. For the first since we came into the Premier League I would be happy with a 17th place finish.
I think appointing a headstrong manager like Keegan and then, effectively, making him a puppet while Dennis Wise buys players was idiotic to the extreme. We are now stuck with a squad of players who are not motivated on the pitch or trying to move on.
I welcomed the appointment of Joe Kinnear – as a stopgap – but it’s not looking as good now with the transfer window about to close and (at the time of writing) no signings to get excited about.
In fact, it sums up our season that Kinnear was appointed to steady the ship but instead rocked the boat with an impressive 52 expletives in his first press conference.
Personally, I think he could have increased the transfer kitty by releasing a festive cover of John Cooper Clarke’s spoken-word classic Evidently Chickentown” (look it up on YouTube).

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Courage or folly?
Picture: dgolfrabbit

Let’s face it it. It doesn’t get much better as a Sunderland football fan. We’ve raced away with promotion championships, got to playoff deciders, played Norwich and Liverpool in Wembley cup finals, stormed into a 4-0 half-time lead against Chelsea…..but beating the Mags 2-1 in successive seasons at St James’ Park brought ecstasy into our lives. Here, repeated from the earlier days of Salut! Sunderland, is one of the stories from one of those games..

PART 2 OF THE MAGS WHO ARE THEY? APPEARS HERE FROM FRIDAY NOON (UK TIME)

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.

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