Just for fun, if following incessant SAFC relegation battles can truly be considered fun, have a go at guessing Saturday’s score.
As Sunderland begin 2016 with Costel Pantilimon off to Watford and Danny Graham bound for Blackburn, there may be chances for Big Sam’s new men to shine in this massive home game.
Bournemouth will probably feel a lot more relaxed than us. They have more points, less weight of expectation on their shoulders and some decent players.
Beauties and Beasts: that’s the name of this series – see it here – of supporters’ recollections of different Sunderland shirts from years and even decades past. It was inspired by an idea from Classic Football Shirts, very welcome here as occasional competition sponsors. Their range of historic SAFC tops is a great internet outing in itself – but it is not complete, as John McCormick is about to explain …
I effectively left the North East in 1970, when I went to live down south in Yorkshire. I did return from time to time, most notably for the home games in our 1973 cup run (I also made the away ones, as it happens), but from Yorkshire I moved to London, and then to Liverpool, where I arrived in the summer of 1975 …
The Hoff needn’t get The Huff. We’ve all had rotten days at work and sometimes, for some of us, on the first day of a new job. Before he knows it, the fans will be singing, ‘Who’s the greatest centre half the world has even seen … Jan Kirchhoff is his name’. Anyone with the sense of history shown in Iain Foster’s comment knows Charlie Hurley also made a wretched start to life with Sunderland. Iain wonders whether we might follow King Charlie with Kaiser Kirchhoff and Pete Sixsmith takes up the story …
As Ed and the family headed off to Halifax for one birthday I headed down to London for another. When he was wandering round to find a pub in which to watch the game I was sitting in White Hart Lane’s West Stand watching the warm up.
The warm-up, from the Upper West Stand
I stayed for two and a half hours. I don’t think Ed ever found the game, although I’m sure he’ll have found a pub. If he managed two and a half hours in the warm, with a drink in his hand and something else on TV, he’ll have had the better of it …
Wrinkly Pete gets shirty at the idea he should wear shirts
See the whole Beauty and Beasts series, presenting supporters’ thoughts on the succession of SAFC shirts over the years, at https://safc.blog/category/beauties-and-beasts/. And if you fancy a browse through the Classic Football Shirts Sunderland range, take a look at http://bit.ly/1ZNPCJA#sthash.P10KFjhR.dpuf. Our deal is that anything readers buy also helps the site with running costs …
Monsieur Salut writes: Salut! Sunderland often asks ‘Who are You?’ interviewees to share their views on the best and worst referees in the Premier League. Mark Clattenburg is the one most commonly named as the best and, for all that he’s a Mag, I agree. Experience has also taught me to be as understanding as most of the pressures on match officials. I criticise bad decisions and inconsistency but am the first the recognise that players make many more bad decisions, and show much greater inconsistency.
In one of the occasional guest pieces we receive from a football academic, Tom Webb, we learn that pundits generally are also more restrained in their assessments of refs than is supposed. It is worth noting that many ex-referees – Graham Poll, Howard Webb and Dermot Gallagher spring to mind – now provide their services to the media as expert assessors …
Pete Sixsmith is there more often that not, saving the occasional delights and absorbing the much more common disappointments of being a Sunderland supporter. Not on Saturday, which found him on the Sixsmith Towers sofa …
Is it not almost a prerequisite of Sunderland AFC support to regard the shirt you see above as a hideous aberration, a shameless departure from proud tradition to make the passing of the steam locomotive seem a mere detail of transport history? It is not. The shirt has, or had, its champions, as Monsieur Salut has been discovering. We hear all too little from the wise and witty folk who inhabit the Blackcats e-mail list. Here, in the latest from our Beauties and Beasts series, Andy Potts*, a Mackem in Moscow exile, puts that right with a valiant defence of the pin-striped SAFC home top from 1981-83 …
Jake: ‘the Hoff looked bewitched, bothered and bewildered the whole time’
No Sixer at the match today, though he was watching, somewhere, and still provided the instant, seven-word verdict. Once again a shot from PVA ended up in the back of the net and this time there was no deflection, just a powerful low finish to a peach of a defence-splitting pass from Adam Johnson. The lead typically lasted all of 90 seconds when Lee Cattermole ‘got into a tangle’, to borrow from Jake’s description, and turned a manageable goal line clearance into a clumsy own goal. In the second half, bad substitutions by Big Sam produced a nightmarish debut for Jan Kirkhoff and, as team shape disintegrated, Spurs got another three to ruin all the work done earlier …
