Let’s meet again: Gary Gowers, a Norwich City winner

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Gary Gowers at Wembley
Gary Gowers at Wembley

This is our second re-run of a winning interview in the HAWAYs, Salut! Sunderland‘s annual awards for the best Q&As with opposing fans for the Who are You? series. Gary Gowers, a Carrow Road regular since the age of six, editor of NorwichCity.MyFootballwriter.com and the Norwich City voice at the Metro newspaper, came second (see announcement of awards at https://safc.blog/2016/06/haway-awards-1-west-bromwich-albion-2-norwich-city-3-tottenhams-littlejohn/0.

Thanks, Gary, for some great answers. Sorry you had to go down but naturally over the moon it was you, not us. Here is the interview as published before we went to Carrow Road, beat them 3-0 and set ourselves up for survival. As our deputy editor Malcolm Dawson put it when awarding high marks to Gary’s entry, ‘Gary Gowers 9/10: cos his name is nearly Gary Owers (lol) … Another good piece from a fan with no airs and graces or illusions who sees his club like we see ours’ …

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Let’s meet again: Salut! Sunderland’s HAWAY winner, West Bromwich Albion’s Dawn Astle

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Jeff's daughter Dawn and granddaughter
Albion beauties, Dawn and daughter Taylar, all smiles before the storm, at the recent FA Cup tie away to Reading

Salut! Sunderland is delighted to announce Dawn Astle, inspiration for the Jeff Astle Foundation in honour of her father, one of the greatest players to wear the colours of West Bromwich Albion, as first-place winner of our HAWAY award for the 2015-2106 season. Read about the results at https://safc.blog/2016/06/haway-awards-1-west-bromwich-albion-2-norwich-city-3-tottenhams-littlejohn/. Here, to be read in the knowledge she was interviewed before the 0-0 draw vs WBA at the Stadium of Light on April 2, a game she attended, is how the interview was introduced and how it proceeded … Dawn wins a subscription to When Saturday Comes …

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Jermain Defoe: Roy Hodgson’s missed open goal for England may be costly

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Jermain Defoe. Cost us nowt. Saved us £100, million.
Jake: ‘France has been wet lately but Hodgson’s a lot wetter for ignoring our man’

A little while ago, back in February as it happens, we published the view of an outsider, Mark Smith, a freelance sports writer based in Prague, that Roy Hodgson should take Jermain Defoe to the Euros. The case got stronger, of course, but the deafness afflicting Hodgson got worse, too. It’s heartening when neutrals see things the way we do, too, but in a partisan way. Here, another writer, Darren Moore, a freelancer based closer to home (Scotland) laments Defoe’s utterly predictable exclusion from the squad and suggests England may suffer as a result …

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Relegation watch revisited (2): It was the draws wot done it

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John McCormick:
John McCormick
number crunching

The season before last we won only 7 games and we stayed up. We even finished above Aston Villa, who won 10, as well as QPR and Hull City, whose 8 wins each could not stave off relegation. The other relegated team, Burnley, had 7 wins, the same as us.

The difference between us and Burnley was that we achieved 17 draws, and lost only (only??) 14 games. They could manage only 12 draws, and their five fewer points meant they finished second bottom, three places below us.

And thinking about that got me started on the notion of win-loss ratios, which became the tool I used to track clubs in last season’s relegation watch.

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Wear Down South? No, no and no again

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Michael Robinson
Michael Robinson

Michael Robinson offers an interesting talking point even if its premise – Sunderland becoming more attractive to star players and their WAGS by relocating all activities except matchday to the leafy, prosperous Home Countries – seems like something a newspaper might have published on April 1. The headline reflects Monsieur Salut’s instinctive response. Wear Down South is a great name for the newsletter of the London and SE branch of the SAFC Supporters’ Association, but SAFC Down South? Please Mr Robinson!

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The Sunderland waiting game that is football’s version of the phoney war

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Malcolm Dawson: things getting better
Malcolm Dawson: things getting better

Salut! Sunderland’s deputy editor Malcolm Dawson shrugs off the torpor of the early close season, pre-transfer window, pre-fixures list and all, and considers what seems to be going right, and what more he’d like to see, in the world of Sunderland AFC …

Back in 1939/40 at the outbreak of World War 2, the whole of Britain was on tenterhooks waiting for an invasion that never came. It became known as “the phoney war”.

Here in the summer of 2016, the celebrations of Sunderland fans relieved at a 17th place finish, may not have been on a par with those on VE Day but were pretty impassioned nonetheless. For some the fact our survival condemned our local rivals only added intensity to the festivities.

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Relegation watch revisted (1): admit it, we fans know nowt about football*

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John McCormick:
John McCormick
having a rest between graphs

Regular visitors will know I’ve been in the habit of looking at the relegation spots for the last couple of years. I haven’t wanted to, it’s just that I’m not sure where the top half of the table is.

So, about a year ago, instead of making my own predictions, I asked readers which clubs were going down, with the aim of tracking these clubs as the season progressed.

The poll ran from June until the end of the transfer season. Initially it was more or less confined to SAFC fans then others  came on board, and some of them weren’t complimentary about us.

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One-word Sunderland ratings: the stars, the flops, the gone or going

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Rob:
Rob: a sharp postscript to the series

Pete Sixsmith rightly and as ever closed the end-of-season reviews with his excellent piece on Friday. But there’s always one straggler and it would be unfair to deny Rob Hutchison a postscript, especially since he concentrates more on individual performances in an extended version of his customary one-word, one-mark ratings after matches he attended or managed to watch …

Rob says: ‘Sadly, I was away on holiday as we travelled the road to safety… a rather late look at the players and their full season ratings . . . I’m sure I’ve missed one or two, and no, let’s not bring Santi home.’ Monsieur Salut says: ‘Harsh on Yedlin. Otherwise, mostly ageed.’


Once again, the full series can be season at https://safc.blog/category/end-of-season-reviews-2016/

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