Are the cigars out? It’s a testament to how far the club has progressed in recent years that this season …
Jeremy Robson is not built in the mould of the docile, acquiescent sort of supporter who takes whatever muck is thrown at him and just rolls over to be tickled now and again. Years spent standing in the Clock Stand Paddock illustrated his passion but made him a critical fan. Here, he kicks off our traditional series of season end assessments …
Your chance to guess the score in the last game of the season and, just maybe, win a life-enhancing prize …
This is what Stan Collymore tweeted the other day after Arsenal had saved our bacon: “Spurs & Arsenal, the shootout on Sunday! We’ll be across every game,as the goals fly in on Super Sunday!”
The inference is that it is just a question of who scores the most goals – Arsenal at St James’ Park, Tottenham Hotspur against us and, though unmentioned, Chelsea at home to Everton. All that matters is who finishes 3rd, 4th and 5th.
Well, Sunderland have something to play for, too. That little thing called pride, but also position.
Hardly the words Sunderland fans want to hear. Not the dreary north London bragging rights – life’s so much more exciting at the bottom – but we want Danny, Danny Rose to see his future with Sunderland and Spurs to let him move. Our final “Who are You?” candidate of the season, the Tottenham-supporting writer Dan Fitch*, founder and owner of TottenhamBlog (“the Spurs news site that expects the worst and is rarely disappointed”) wants him back and hints that Andre Villas-Boas does, too …
Peter Sixsmith is as die hard a Sunderland fan as you are likely to find, such a resolute red and …
Here’s where you can say what you wish about the fact that we have stayed up and the manner in which that was achieved.
Either that or shattered nerves have sent Lars Knutsen round the bend. He expects Wigan to stumble at the Emirates tonight and we all know what that would mean, unless stumble were to equal draw and they then thumped Villa by a cricket score while we lost heavily at Spurs (a combination of 6-0 and 5-0, for example, and we’d go down on same goal difference, fewer scored). That’s clearly not a scenario Lars envisages, but he does expect a surviving Sunderland to reinvent themselves as punk’s footballing equivalent. Without, Monsieur Salut trusts, the music …
The cruel truth is that our season seems over. Sunderland inspire so little confidence that many, maybe most supporters feel at least they’ll know the worst by tomorrow night. In other words, Wigan fail to win and we survive, they win and we go down, since few consider Sunderland up to doing the job for themselves at Spurs. And no one would dare look to Villa for favours, though they’d go down on goal difference should all the ifs come together including us drawing at WHL. Pete Sixsmith has seen it all before. Will he pay to endure it again? …
This appeared somewhere or other …
If you needed one match to sum up the woefulness of Sunderland’s season, this was it.
So our Champions League final might as well have been an end-of-season jaunt. Southampton, clearly the better side without even being that good, will feel aggrieved at dropping two points. Sunderland survive for now but rely, in all rational probability, on Arsenal or Villa to maintain that survival. Paolo Di Canio knows the score as his post-match e-mail makes clear …