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Exiled in Abu Dhabi, Rob McKenzie misses his beloved ice hockey. But watching the suffering of a Sunderland-daft colleague who can catch every kick live on TV offers a sharp reminder of sporting under-achievement back home

Fans of Sunderland AFC and the Toronto Maple Leafs are twins separated at birth, cheering through thin and thinner for teams whose glories are tinted sepia. The Leafs last captured the Stanley Cup in 1967. Sunderland supporters chortle still over a match from 1908.

If by some fluke these kindred spirits were to meet, the crux of their conversation might go:

“Oh, so you’re a loser. Whaddaya know, I’m a loser too …………….”

At time of writing, the Maple Leafs are 19-8-22 in league play this season, Sunderland 5-5-13. The Leafs are coasting to a third consecutive year of missing the playoffs, an impressive feat given that 16 of the National Hockey League’s 30 teams qualify. Sunderland are romancing relegation, more exclusive territory as only three in 20 may attain it.

Perhaps the Leafs would be better off if they possessed Sunderland’s more miserable record. Their mediocrity undermines their future, because it is the NHL’s truly abysmal teams that get first crack at young talent in the annual player turnover. So they’re bad enough to be bad, but not bad enough to get better.

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Thousands of miles from home, SAFC expats can gawp at every step of the Lads’ up-down-down Premiership progress while ticketless fans at home make do with radio commentary and TV highlights. Pete Sixsmith fears the differences do not end with football viewing rights

Ah, the advantages of working in a country which has no restrictive rules on the games you can watch on television. There might not be one-man one-vote democracy either, but you can at least watch the Lads without having to travel to north London and spend hours on a coach.

Colin’s report echoes what I heard on BBC Radio N******** and saw on MOTD. Careless defending + slack finishing = a long drawn out relegation battle. Such a disappointment after last week’s rousing performance against Portsmouth, but typical of the way we have gone about this season.

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Where our defence gets panto practice?
Picture: dsch

One moment of pathetic defending at the start, another at the end and glaring misses as we got agonisingly close to an equaliser. Business back to normal after our latest one-win-in-a-row sequence.

McShane’s naive and clumsy attempt at a clearance after less than two minutes, aided and abetted by colleagues unable to get the ball upfield or up into the stand, gave Spurs a dream start. When Murphy was presented with as good an opportunity in similar circumstances, his feeble response must have left most Sunderland fans resigned to the likelihood that this, yet again, would not be our away day.

Yet we went on to have further chances as we dominated the second half. Chopra’s spectacular miss – ball, not target – would have been comical had he still been playing for Newcastle, while Miller and Whitehead and probably others also missed when scoring would have been easier, in one or two cases even for me.

Pressing forward as relentlessly – and necessarily – as we did, we were inevitably vulnerable to breakaways. But Robbie Keane can scarcely have believed his luck. It wasn’t even a breakaway but a routine goalkeeper’s punt from his area to ours.

Nosworthy and Evans somehow missed the bounce and let him slip through, and a £9 million keeper marred a fine match with goalkeeping more in the £100,000 region. The ball was hit hard but straight; it still managed to squeeze beneath Craig Gordon’s diving body and Keane had his 100th Spurs goal to script.

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Fame was clearly the spur, and the words have come in bucketloads from White Hart Lane. With reassuring brevity, Greg Meyer* rounds off Salut! Sunderland’s own silly season – and Salut! thanks ’em all

Surely Keane vs Keane is not a relegation dogfight

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Diamond White, aka Paxton Lee*, leapt at the chance of writing for Salut! Sunderland‘s new Who Are They? feature ahead of Saturday’s game at White Hart Lane. Will we extend our run of one win running? Will we snatch a plucky draw? Or will we just continue this season’s normal away service of losing most things in sight? Paxton thinks he knows the answer

Let’s not pretend otherwise, for us this week is all about the League Cup Semi-final 2nd leg against the Woolwich Wanderers.

We haven’t beaten them for years and we are a game away from Wembley. However, we would be foolish to underestimate the importance of Saturday’s affair with Sunderland. One look at the league table will show you that an away win would see Sunderland within one point of us.

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Sunderland fans would settle for a controversial win on the lines of a 1938 FA Cup tie clinched by a Raich carter goal. Logan Holmes* and his fellow Spurs supporters want Berbatov to emulate the scoring record Jimmy Greaves (pictured) had against us

Saturday’s game at White Hart Lane will be the 100th competitive meeting between Spurs and Sunderland with Tottenham holding a slight advantage in the overall record: 38 wins ahead of Sunderland’s 35.

Throughout that record, Sunderland have a history of spoiling Spurs’ hopes and ambitions.

Back in 1938 – no, I wasn’t there – Sunderland travelled to London for an FA Cup 6th round tie. Sunderland were the 1st Division side and the FA Cup holders while Spurs had dropped down into the 2nd Division three years earlier.

White Hart Lane recorded the highest ever attendance – 75,038 were packed into the ground as the players took to the pitch. Such a scenario, a record crowd, deserved a home win but Sunderland had other ideas; however their victory was not without controversy.

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Thanks to all you Spurs fans. Thanks even more if you recognise our greater need for points (just now) and grant us an away win on condition you still finish much higher.

The response to my launch of Who Are They? has been tremendous, with articles lined up for future games and a great bunch of postings for more immediate use.

Sappers’s witty offering is already up there and further pieces from Logan Holmes and “Paxton Lee” will appear over the next 24 hours, with yet another, from Greg Meyer, also promised.

I will find a way of making the multiple Spurs pieces easily viewable without cluttering up the main postings column. If I can. But with mentions of Raich Carter, Chris Waddle, Paul Stewart, Jimmy Greaves and Ben Alnwick to come, it’s worth sticking around whatever my struggles with blogosphere technology.

With the exception of my very good friend David Sapsted’s words, already posted, these items appear thanks to Jim Duggan, who runs the Topspurs site. And no sooner had I thanked Jim for being such a gent than this arrived (from Jim):

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See also: A tale of two Keanes
What Kevin Ball did with the goal at his mercy
That’s 100 competitive games between SAFC &s Spurs

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Sunderland beating Spurs in the first game of the season was the last thing Londoncentric sports writers expected. Weren’t Tottenham going to be one of the big performers this season? David Sapsted – Sappers to his pals – certainly thought so

CAST your mind back to last August, if you will. There was a foot and mouth outbreak in Surrey, fires raging across southern California and – as ever at that time of year – the pulses of Spurs fans were racing notably faster than normal.

The 2007-8 season, we told ourselves, was going to be the one when we finally fulfilled all that promise…our team of perpetual under-achievers (only thwarted, if you recall, from a place in the Champions’ League a few months earlier by some dodgy lasagne on the eve of the crucial West Ham game) were going to come good at last.

No doubt about it. Absolutely none. We were all supremely confident and, for the first time in a lot of years, had good cause to be so.

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