When you are beaten as comprehensively as at the Stadium of Light last night, there is no point in looking for excuses. Man City were much, much too good for us. Gus Poyet saw that and knows his job is to avoid demoralisation affecting the approach to another tough task, Liverpool away on Saturday. Here’s his post-match e-mail to Monsieur Salut and thousands more …
Pete Sixsmith was less happy at half time than he had been on Saturday evening. For ‘more of the same, please, Lads’, it became a blunt admission that Sunderland were making costly errors at both ends. It was to continue in similar vein, especially at the end it mattered – ours – and, if truth be told, we were outclassed and walloped …
Dec 3 SAFC (1) 1 Manchester City (2) 4 City’s hoodoo ended, aided by poor defending
Since Salut! Sunderland has always been a champion of women’s football, it seems fitting to post the clip of …
Colin Randall
writes: Alex Sargent* will have been a happy man after his beloved Manchester City went to St Mary’s and made the gap between our respective results at Southampton a whacking 11 goals. We could counter with Schalke (0-5 Chelsea) followed by Sunderland (0-0, Chelsea arguably riding their luck). But Wednesday brings a new game, a new challenge. Can we keep up the frankly astonishing sequence of 1-0, 1-0, 1-0 and 1-0? Can we carry on where we left off last April when Sunderland were desperately unlucky not to win the game that ended 2-2 – they’d already been fortunate at Wembley (no way back, I’d suggest, if Borini had buried that second chance)? We’ll see. Now let Alex – who has family links with Wearside – speak for himself …
You don’t get long to rest on your laurels in the Premier League.
In a fairer world, Sunderland would have had a week to bask in the glory of the invigorating and much-praised performance against Chelsea. Or there’d even be an international break with Roy Hodgson putting away those blinkers and handing Lee Cattermole his first full England cap.
Pete Sixsmith is on Father Christmas duty today, up in Weardale where Monsieur Salut once looked out of the window of a Save Our Railway Line special and saw him doing his stuff with the red-and-white-striped Shildon Sunderland Supporters’ FC team. But he delayed his drive up the dale to write this fittingly noble report on yesterday’s outstanding performance against Chelsea, one that went agonisingly close to yielding three points instead of one …
Rob Hutchison had to watch on a stream but was quick off the mark with his one word player ratings. No quarrels from Monsieur Salut (though 10/10 for Catts would have been tempting), who wrote at ESPN ‘At no stage of this game, with the possible exception of an opening spell of compelling but ultimately fruitless possession by Chelsea, were manager Gus Poyet’s players second best to his former club’.
Unbeknown to M Salut, deputy editor Malcolm Dawson, just in from the match, had already started editing Hutch’s ratings. This was Malcolm’s introduction: Rob Hutchison is a man of few words. At least he is when rating the Sunderland team in the minutes following the full time whistle. Today’s performances all rate highly against a team that had scored in every game this season and were unbeaten as they arrived at the Stadium of Light. They left still unbeaten (and defeat would have been harsh on them) but this was a gutsy Sunderland performance …
Malcolm Dawson writes……He’s a hard taskmaster that M Salut! No sooner am I in the house, back from the Stadium …
Pete Sixsmith said at half time that Sunderland were giving Chelsea a tough old game and he was right. And when he cried for more, he got it. This was a superb point and could have been three with a spot more luck, from a game in which SAFC were never truly second best. Sixer offers two seven-word verdicts; his fuller assessment should be a rousing read …
Nov 29 SAFC (0) 0 Chelsea (0) 0*A performance to make Sunderland supporters proud or Could and maybe should have won it
Standard practice around here is that an admirable band of stalwarts call by every day or so to see what Salut! Sunderland has been up to.
Hundreds more, and sometimes thousands, visit the site only when something new appears on newsnow.co.uk’s SAFC pages or a kind soul drops a link at Ready to Go or elsewhere.
The trick, when trying to avoid descent into insanity as a fan site editor, is to take it all in the stride. Must Not Fret about readership figures should be the mantra; let us be the low-circulation site for the thinking supporter and stop worrying about tabloid-level hits.