Credit: Musa Göncüo?lu
Football fans can be mightily sensitive given their reputation for boisterous irreverence.
Case in point: the recent debate here about the changing face of Stoke City, inspired by Pete Sixsmith’s whimsical article about wishing he could wake up as a supporter of that club and not the one he’s followed for half a century.
Malcolm Dawson writes……..Pete Sixsmith’s report of events on the south coast is a little later than usual because of late …
Malcolm Dawson writes……as if to prove the point I made after the Palace game on Tuesday Southampton’s last gasp equaliser …
Pete Sixsmith doesn’t yet know the full detail of the fevered response from the Potteries to his tongue-in-cheek “I love Stoke City” piece. He’s been too busy enjoying a trip to the south coast and points west. His early spring break came agonisingly close to achieving perfection, Jermain Defoe’s goal seeming enough to secure three precious points only for the best move of the game to produce an equaliser deep into stoppage time, even after Big Sam tried to bolster the defence by sending on John O’Shea for the last few minutes. Come back for Sixer’s longer account of the match, which will land as soon as his travels allow …
The atmosphere at the Stadium of Light as Sunderland pressed for the equaliser against Crystal Palace, which Fabio Borini finally supplied in style, got Paul Summerside thinking.
Call it positive thinking, or plain old clutching at straws over post-match pints at the Avenue, but he reckons we are more fired up as a side in evening games, especially at home and when – as is usually the case as a season draws to a close – there’s a lot to play for. There’s one such game to come in the run-in -the still-to-be-rescheduled Everton home game – but Paul senses, maybe, more to come. He also takes heart from the competing priorities of some of the teams we’re still to play …
Let’s be honest. We love Stoke City for beating the Mags this week, allowing us to start the weekend out of the bottom three. We haven’t always loved them. It had something to do with the way Stoke seemed to cling on to the hooligan age longer than most, the muscular nature of Tony Pulis’s approach to goalmouth tactics (at either end) and the neanderthal hounding of Aaron Ramsey. But Salut! Sunderland has broadly enjoyed excellent rapport with Stoke fans willing to answer our Who are You? questions and, lo and behold, City are all of a sudden a decent side playing good, winning football.
Pete Sixsmith was brilliant on BBC Radio Newcastle this week, hailing the virtues of Stoke and saying, more or less, how nice it must be to wake up as a Stoke supporter instead of enduring SAFC’S annual assault on our collective blood pressure. Here he explains why …
Tom Williams* answered the call at Twitter for a Saints fan to do the honours ahead of Saturday’s match. We …
Adam Johnson, as most readers will know, faces a probable jail sentence measured in years not months after being convicted of one of the outstanding charges against him at Bradford Crown Court concerning sexual activity with a girl then aged 15.
The judge talked of having formed a preliminary view that he should receive five years’ imprisonment based on a range of four to 10.
Malcolm Dawson writes….I have this view, which I trot out from time to time, that it’s far better to see …
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Rob Hutchison’s one-word, one-mark verdicts after the draw against Palace had this for our right back: “Yedlin 7 enduring.”
In my ESPN FC match reflections, I also gave DeAndre 7/10 and this made him my man of the match for us (Rob had him joint first with Borini; ESPN’s style is not to award a rating to players used after 70 minutes).