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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.

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Pete Sixsmith and I saw Leeds v Sunderland, and then Sunderland v Leeds, in very quick succession immediately after Christmas 1963, a promotion season for both clubs.

At Elland Road, I described Leeds loudly as the filthiest team I had ever seen. Pete agreed, but was a little more diplomatic because we were in the care of his Leeds-supporting relatives. Both of us were delighted when, having snatched a 1-1 draw away, we comfortably won at Roker Park with goals from George Herd and Nic Sharkey in front of a 55,000 crowd.

I hated Leeds then and, irrationally since I no longer have the excuse of youthful folly, hate them still. But they were a filthy team, and the sheer nastiness of the way they played has stuck in the mind in the hundreds of years that have since gone by.

So before the playoff final, I expected to be delighted if the upstarts of Doncaster beat their once mighty Yorkshire rivals.

At an early stage of the season, as Leeds clawed back those 15 deducted points, I wrote this:

I cannot work out why this is, because I have always disliked Leeds, but I want them to beat Orient, too.
It must have something to do with loving great football turnarounds. Ours last season wasn’t a bad example, come to think of it, and who else remembers the glorious failure of that relegation season when, after not scoring for weeks and weeks, we suddenly started walloping everyone in sight for a while? I’ll resolve this love-hate relationship by praying for Leeds to get within sight of automatic promotion only to stumble in the last few games and not quite make the playoffs.

And to my friend, Julian, a Leeds fan living in Paris, I may even have refined the prayer, to have United going all the way to Wembley and then losing, just as they did.

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If you were up and about early, you may have seen Salut! Sunderland as a work in progress as I edited Pete Sixsmith’s new Soapbox offering live

Scroll down and, if your eyesight is good and your mouse control true, you’ll see that in an article for the Irish Mail on Sunday, published the day we hammered Luton and went up as champions, I wrote: “For all Keane’s welcome promises that he is not approaching next season as a manager who would be happy with fourth bottom, plenty of Sunderland fans are setting their sights no higher.”
Pete considered all the money Keano had to spend strengthening for the season ahead, and looked for something better. In the Victor Meldrew version of his end-of-season review, he identifies what went wrong enough for us to end up in a relegation scrap which, happily, we survived – by finishing just two places above my minimalistic expectations…

After the optimism of Pollyanna, there needs to be an alternative view. The opposite of Pollyanna’s unbridled positivity is the constant stream of negativity and criticism that comes from the more Victor Meldrewish of our fans – and looking through back issues of Soapbox, there are times when I could have been well and truly included in that classification.

So, let’s see if the negatives can outweigh the positives for 2007-08. Yes, we avoided relegation but not by much and a great deal more was expected considering the outlay on players.

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Congratulations to Kenwyne Jones, who capped a terrific season for Sunderland by capturing two player of the the year awards. After easily topping the official club site poll, he was then voted the players’ own choice in a training ground ballot.

Danny Collins, who came second in both, enjoyed the huge consolation of being the supporters’ selection as player of the season. Such success for an unglamorous footballer who gives total commitment to the club is not surprising; Sunderland fans have always recognised the need for graft and passion along with the flair.

Collins is emphatically not a flair player, but he has the do-or-die spirit – at both ends of the pitch – that we associate with Charlie Hurley, Joe Bolton and Kevin Ball.

  And isn’t he glad to be in our stripes now? 
  Picture: iowsaintsfan

Kenwyne, however, won hands down in the safc.com poll, scoring 96,810 votes compared with 36,350 for Danny (20 points being awarded for each first choice recorded, 10 for each second). And for all Collins’s heroics, he was the logical victor, since he displayed both guts AND flair, covering acres of ground each game and providing matchwinning goals or assists in several.

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Most of us know the story of the curate’s egg*. Eager not to offend after being invited to breakfast by the bishop and served a bad egg, he insisted that that it was good in parts. That’s roughly as Pete Sixsmith found the season just ended. Keano and the Lads should perhaps not get too carried away by his benevolent look at the albumen; there’s still the yolk to go……

Many years ago, when the Earth was still young, I was dragged off to either the Essoldo or the Hippodrome in Shildon to see a film called Pollyanna.

I remember being distinctly underwhelmed by this experience seeing as nobody seemed to ride a horse across the plains, asked for a slug of red eye in a dirty glass or shot copious numbers of what were then known as Red Indians.

It appeared to be about a little girl (ugh!) who went round spreading sweetness and light (a little like Amy Winehouse does now) and generally being positive while all around were being gloomy.

So, let’s review the past season through the eyes of a Pollyanna Whittier and look for things to be glad about.

Well, first of all we are still in the Premier League. After the 15 point season, that’s got to be something to feel glad about. We could well be on our way to establishing ourselves as a Premier League fixture like Blackburn, Villa and Middlesbrough.

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London has only just voted in its new mayor, and already there is a broken promise. Pete Sixsmith‘s not Boris’s. Having vowed to boycott the capital if it voted for the white-haired one, famously described as “neither as nice nor as stupid as he seems”, Sixer is already making plans for a return to Craven Cottage….

And so another season comes to an end, if not with a bang or a whimper at least with a rousing farewell to this year’s team.

It seems strange going into the final game with nothing resting on it, but I would not have wanted to be like the Blues of Birmingham or Reading knowing that the whole thing was out of their own control. Been there, done that and got several T-shirts.

So, a pleasant end to the season, with both sides giving lads a run out. Arsenal were good. Their movement was exceptional, their pace at times blistering and their strength in depth impressive. It’s not every day you see the captain of Brazil having “a run out”.

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Bare necessities

Chained to the work station, I still nurtured hopes of keeping one eye on events at the Stadium of Light.

My younger daughter, out here in Abu Dhabi for a holiday, does not agree with my approach to the season’s climax. Despite, shamefully, supporting Liverpool instead of Sunderland and regarding the Lads as only her “second” club, whatever one of those is, she paid little attention to either Spurs v Liverpool or SAFC v Arsenal.

All 10 games were available live at the touch of a remote control button on Showtime channels, but she was glued to the championship and relegation games. “But dad, there was nothing at stake for either Sunderland or Liverpool,” she said later.

One of us is clearly missing the point completely.

Of course I am interested in who wins the title – I loathe Chelsea, so that settles that one – and who goes down (Brum’s fate doesn’t bother me, but I feel a little sad for Reading).

But I would sooner watch any game involving SAFC than any game not involving them. Simple as that. The whole thing is explained in my Club v Country chapter in the ALS book More 24 Hour SAFC People, so no need to repeat it all here (though the link gives you the chapter in full).

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Salut! Sunderland naturally considered Nick Hornby, Piers Morgan and similar Arsenal glory seekers when it became clear that the last game of the season should have a second Who Are They? Then we remembered that there are a few real supporters, too. Step forward Richard Stickland* – Stickers to his pals, and that’s him kneeling far left in the front row of a squad of Gooners before the losing FA Cup final against Liverpool in 2001. He fondly remembers Big Niall as “Snakey-boy”, less fondly recalls a Lord Gary Rowell hat-trick at Roker Park and generously, for us, predicts a point apiece on Sunday….

Sunderland to me means long boozy weekends staying with my friends Davey and Julie, who are massive Sunderland fans, at their house in Langley Park.

In fact myself, my brother Roy and our friend Chris have often imposed on their hospitality, for our visits to Newcastle and Middlesbrough as well as for Sunderland matches.

A typical weekend up north would involve driving up on Friday, having a couple of beers and some food before getting a taxi to Durham for an old fashioned pub crawl, which died out in London years ago.

Saturday was usually match day, where we would go to a pub near the Stadium of Light for a couple of liveners before the match. Saturday evening would invariably be spent in the Tap and Spile pub in Framwellgate Moor, for some serious real ale drinking. Sunday morning we would feed our hangovers with huge bacon baps before travelling back down the motorway to London.

One Sunderland game I remember missing. My older brother Jeff announced in 1984 that he was getting married and was trying to sort the date out for the ceremony.

Myself and Roy duly presented him with an Arsenal fixture list with instructions that he must choose a Saturday when Arsenal were away, otherwise he would have two empty seats at the register office.

The date he decided on was March 3 1984 , which coincided with the Sunderland v Arsenal Division One match at Roker Park, which ended in a 2-2 draw. I missed Tony Woodcock’s 40-yard goal that day. I hope my brother appreciated my sacrifice.

And now for your questions…..

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