Pete Sixsmith then (not so long ago) … he’s a lot trimmer nowWe know who was at Ashton Gate for the great return from the dead.
Olivia Hutchison was there and her shortest of video clips, capturing the exhilaration of the away end after a composite known as OG scored his second, our third, has been repeated over and again at Twitter.
Usually, if he’s there, Rob Hutchison dictates one-word player-by-player verdicts and his daughter Olivia passes them on to us. Today, he was absent. She was there – and how she enjoyed the last few minutes of a game we once seems destined to lose by a cricket score. ‘The worst 45 minutes of football followed by the best 45 minutes of football – That’s Sunderland for you,’ she says while hardly preparing top-of-the-form marks for the players …
Monsieur Salut writes: John McCormick, setting up this week’s Sixer’s Sevens, wrote: ‘We might not be expecting a result at Ashton Gate but we should expect something from our team. Commitment, pride, maybe even a modicum of skill. And hopefully a structure that works and which will provide a framework for a climb out of the depths’
At half time, the words seemed hollow. Three down, with Sixer’s increasingly disgusted, anguished texts piling up and our poor fans singing ‘you’re not fit to wear the shirt’. Some left at the whistle for the interval. They missed an astonishing comeback, not quite to 4-3 but to 3-3. Thanks heavens for McGeady and whoever scored the own goals (sign them up, too). Nowhere near out of the wood but a point we barely expected before the game and thought an absurd proposition after 37 minutes …
Whatever our feelings as yet another Sunderland horror show is staged (NB: thoroughly mitigated by an astonishing second-half fightback at Ashton Gate bringing us a 3-3 draw), it would be criminal not to offer a tribute to Liam Miller, who has died at the cruelly young age of 36 from pancreatic cancer.
Late Update. Monsieur Salut says: Barnes and Benno both said no one could have seen it coming. My own concluding line to this piece was tongue in cheek. But the unthinkable happened: we came back to draw. Still a shambles at times – SAFC could have been six down before the first of ours went in, but what a fightback …
Salut! Sunderland rarely posts during games. There should be no point. One up or down, even two, drawing … things can change.
But with us, you know one down almost certainly means defeat. Two equals certain defeat. Three before half time? As poor Pete Sixsmith put it in a text from Ashton Gate: “Disgraceful.”
John McCormick writes: I hitched to quite a few games – including some at Roker Park – and I do remember going down the M5 in a Reliant Robin when it (the M5, not the car) was a two-lane motorway. I still believe its front wheel (the car’s, not the M5’s) left the ground when we went above 60.
However, for this game (for when else could I have seen Joe Baker at Bristol?) I went on a John Tennick bus. An overnight journey, a killer result, an evening of pubs and an overnight journey back. To think that we took such things in our stride. Now I’m looking askance at the 40-mile trip to Bolton in a week or so.
Phil Clarke, outside his gran’s childhood home in East View, with youngest son Red, a stone’s throw from Roker Park
Monsieur Salut writes: I think we’d rather like to keep the Stadium of Light. Answers on a postcard, please, re the unexpected interest in Billy Jones. We met Phil Clarkebefore the home game, another of those best forgotten afternoons at the Stadium of Light. Phil naturally had a great day out, checking his family’s solid Wearside roots – he is the nephew of our own Pete Lynn (Wrinkly Pete). No other Bristol City fan responded to our feelers for the return game, so Phil updates us with thoughts on the Robins’ excellent cup run and what continues to be a good, promotion-chasing season in the league … but does he realise just how much our Billy might cost his club? …
Jake: ‘will VAR and punishment after the crime just make cheats better at cheating?’
Monsieur Salut: would I have taken survival last season, would I take survival this season, if it depended on a blatant act of cheating by a Sunderland player? Easy to say no when, in the heart, you might mean yes, maybe or depends. But I’ll stick to my guns and say no. And whatever individual fans feel about matters affecting their teams, football as a sport should rise above natural human instincts to win at whatever cost …
A realistic breath of fresh air or a deplorable attempt to defend the indefensible? That appears to be our choice as we assess the Tottenham manager Mauricio Pochettino’s efforts to shrug off diving as unimportant.
Salut! Sunderland has never sat on the fence. Diving is cheating. It should have no place in the game. Perpetrators ought to be boiled in oil or, if medieval punishments are out of fashion, suspended for three or more games. When a Sunderland player dives, as Dele Alil does so often for Spurs, we make no attempt to defend or excuse.
Lining up for that last game together, against Red Star: (L to R) Edwards, Colman, Jones, Morgans, Charlton, Viollet, Taylor, Foulkes, Gregg, Scanlon, Byrne. By Scanpix, via Wikimedia Commons
Monsieur Salut writes: no one at ESPN will mind, I am sure, if I repeat an example of my own work for them to mark the anniversary of the Munich air crash that inflicted such terrible losses on Manchester United’s Busby Babes, and the journalistic talent of their city, 60 years ago today. This is how I remembered it in a piece published before a SAFC-Man Utd match five years ago. There will be small changes to make it more relevant to our supporters or update the text, which necessarily applied to the game I was previewing for ESPN. Sunderland were still in the Premier League and the article as it originally appeared would therefore seem a little outdated …
