There’s been plenty to keep us busy in the build-up to Sunday’s derby.
The framed photographs you see are the alternative prizes offered to Sunderland and Newcastle supporters entering the Guess the Score competition at https://safc.blog/category/salut-competition/guess-the-score-salut-competition/
The French Connection strikes again. Monsieur Salut is no more French than Lee Cattermole but has a French wife and city-in-law and spends a lot of time in France. Now our associate editor John McCormick turns out to have a half-French nephew, Anthony Petit*. Despite the name, Tony probably isn’t little at all; he certainly isn’t a Sunderland supporter. To adapt our old Eric Roy chant, ‘C’est Ooh Agh, c’est ooh agh, je suis un Mag y’naagh’. In remarkably good English – his mother’s from Birtley and he has some choice words for Mike Ashley – he upholds the tradition of cracking Who are You? interviews …
Monsieur Salut writes: I have checked the origins of this news item and it may well have come from S Bruce of Hull, or J Colback of Killingworth, in either case embarking on a new career as an informed Salut! Sunderland newshound. On further inspection, it must be from one of our own …
Well we all know Fletch won’t score three unless the Mags put out Gibraltar’s un-Rocklike defence.
But could he or Jermain Defoe or Connor Wickham or, indeed, Danny Graham or Duncan Watmore get the goal that wins the latest edition of the Wear-Tyne derby?
No Sunderland supporter truly cares where a winner might come from. Newcastle fans will think more or less likewise.
The build-up to Wear-tyne and tyne-Wear derbies – says Monsieur Salut, pettily using lower case to diminish Jimmy Nail’s Big River (half-decent song, actually) – should start at least as early as the approach to any other game. This one is horribly important to us. Steven Fletcher boosted his confidence no end with his hat-trick for Scotland, but can he do to the Mags what he did to Gibraltar? While covering the inquest into the deaths of the IRA’s would-be bombers killed by the SAS on The Rock, M Salut befriended a court official who happened to have played badminton for Gibraltar at the Commonwealth Games. A match was arranged and ended in a draw, each winning one game. M Salut is, and was not even then, an especially fit man. Is that the measure of Fletch’s otherwise commendable achievement?
While we ponder such weighty questions, it seems a good idea to run a few blasts from the past. Here, as a start, is my cousin David Athey, whose outstanding piece, first published here a few seasons ago, sums up what I think should be the true nature of a rivalry that divides families, friends, schoolfriends and workmates …
James Bentley is the author of an imminent book about one of the best seasons in the history of Bury, albeit one overshadowed, as he now explains, by grim events in British football. One of the stars of the Bury squad, jusrt 15 strong, was Wayne Etwistle, who made 53 starting appearances for Sunderland between 1977 and 1979, scoring 15 goals. James takes up the story …
Tuesday 13th April 1999 was a night both sets of supporters at Gigg Lane would remember for a long time.
As we’re not playing this weekend, I thought I’d provide some March-flavoured comment. I see it as my duty as a citizen of the European Capital of Culture (2008) to bring enlightenment to the denizens of the runners up, Newcastle-Gateshead. You’re one of them, by the way. The Angel of the North is part of Northumberland according to the opening of Robson Greens’ latest TV series, and Hadrian’s wall marks the border with Scotland according to independence referendum pundits, so anywhere up north must surely qualify as part of Newcastle-Gateshead, which are and always will be two distinct towns as far as I’m concerned.
I must include references to football, of course, which allows me to begin by saying March down here saw quite a few miserable faces following Everton’s exit from Europe and then Stevie G’s early bath, which no doubt contributed to a defeat at the hands of Liverpool’s arch arch-enemy. Ha!
With thanks to the Sunderland Ladies official site
The question is posed the other way round by Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. “Women are irrational, that’s all there is to that,” he sings. “Their heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags! They’re nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, agitating. Maddening and infuriating hags! Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
But Henry wasn’t to know how bad our men would be, and how good the Lasses are.
It’s been open season on Sunderland. Harry Redknapp tells Alan Brazil on TalkSport we’re the worst team in the Premier …
Ken Gambles is Sunderland through and through. But the recent death of Dave Mackay got him thinking back to some of the giants of English football seen in his student days. Let Ken reacquaint older readers with – and introduce younger ones to – some of the players who gave him such pleasure without ever pulling on the red and white stripes of Sunderland …