Sixer’s Everton Soapbox: Toffees chewed up, now Bent on a Villa clincher

by
Two wins in a row and Jake is perfecting Sixer's smile
Two wins in a row and Jake is perfecting Sixer’s smile

We’ve all seen false dawns but no one can seriously doubt the impact Paolo Di Canio has had or where we would be, for all his feelings of being hard done by, had Martin O’Neill stayed. Pete Sixsmith wonders whether the same commitment from players and fans seen on Saturday can propel SAFC to safety at Villa Park next Monday night. He also detects the essential changes evident from two marvellous wins against NUFC and Everton. MoN, if he were an avid reader of Salut! Sunderland, might say Sixer identified similar improvements when he first took over and he’d be right. But can PDC sustain this progress where the Ulsterman, sadly, could not?

Read more

Sixer’s Sevens: SAFC 1 Everton 0. Three more priceless points

by

SAFCvEVERTON(FT)

Another mighty, mighty win and Pete Sixsmith‘s mid to late-season wobble may be over with any luck. Twice in six days he has seen a rejuvenated Sunderland take three points from a game. Today Stephane Sessegnon hit the first-half winner in a tense, even match that mattered mostly because of the further step it took Sunderland to safety and secondly because it put an end to a long, long wait to defeat Everton. Is it still a little early to start planning for another Premier League season? …

Read more

Salut! Sunderland Podcast: Newcastle done, now that other bogey team, Everton!

by

BANNER!Charlie

Hear the latest Salut! Sunderland podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/wise-men-say

If there ever was a game that dreams were made of then few could argue that was it! There’s some sort of superiority/inferiority complex constantly spilling over from the personalities of Newcastle/Sunderland fans when it comes to the other. Whichever way you look at it, only more results of this nature will start to amend that, writes Stephen Goldsmith.

Read more

SAFC v Everton: no Cahill, no Webb to fall for an ‘Osman’. Guess the Score

by
Jake: the nearly overlooked detail
Jake: the nearly overlooked detail


Tim Cahill been shunted off to New York. Howard Webb is demoted to pub league football, or whatever is deemed his punishment for stopping Sunderland being four-up at half time against Newcastle, and no other referee in the world will surely, ever again, fall for the Leon Osman penalty trick.

That still leaves the small matter of how we actually win when playing Everton.

Read more

Sunderland v Everton ‘Who are You?’: on ‘Zinedine Kilbane and Reidy my boyhood hero’

by
Jake asks the question
Jake asks the question

Right, thrashing Toon was the easy part. Now for Everton. We call them a bogey team; they say they’re just better. Last season pretty much ended for SAFC with the FA cup exit in a Stadium of Light replay that was painful to watch after a good draw at Goodison. Earlier, we’d had the infamous Leon Osman fall-over-and-claim-a-pen routine that our friend Howard Webb fell-for-and-gave. That piece of odious cheating aside, Everton deserved their point on the day, were incontestably better in the cup replay and naturally won the Goodison league game with complete ease. Martin Fricker*, from the Daily Mirror, is a lifelong Everton fan. He fondly recalls Peter Reid and “Zinedine Kilbane”, has interesting thoughts on derby rivalries, wishes this game had happened before last Sunday but expects another draw …

Read more

The Robson Report: PDC makes it so simple; why couldn’t O’Neill?

by
Jeremy Robson
Jeremy Robson

Some of the most thought-provoking analysis of things that matter to Sunderland AFC supporters comes from the great Mackem diaspora. This comment on the Blackcats e-mail list – “the older I get the more I become convinced that it really is a simpler game than the coaches, tacticians and (especially) pundits would have us believe” – emanated from the region (Mick Goulding in Co Durham) but set Jeremy Robson, over in Canada, thinking about some of the basic failings of the Martin O’Neill regime and the equally basic remedies Paolo Di Canio is applying. In an interesting riposte, Moscow-based Andy Potts sees similarities in the early achievements of both men …

Read more

Epitaph for Eppleton – and hold your horses on Tyneside

by
Sixer: still a happy man
Sixer: still a happy man

Elsewhere, we have made our apologies to mayfly larvae and other forms of pond life feeling insulted at comparison with the Newcastle United ‘fans’ who rampaged through the city centre after their team lost a football game, as their fathers perhaps did before them when Toon suffered reverses. Jake notes that the yobs made it on to the nine o’clock Spanish news. And Pete Sixsmith, while reporting on the Under 21s’ defeat by Blackburn Rovers, worries about the safety of any horse with a Geordie accent should results go badly this coming weekend …

Read more

French Fancies: Newcastle 0 SAFC 3 un show unique, says L’Equipe

by
No need to translate: for L'Equipe, it was 'une victoire amplement méritée'
No need to translate: for L’Equipe, it was ‘une victoire amplement méritée’

It is not often that a Sunderland game features so prominently in the French press. Even though the sports daily, L’Equipe, covers the Premier League reasonably well, you can guess which teams dominate their columns.

Today is different. Paolo Di Canio’s exuberant celebration of each goal at St James’ Park gets the generous illustration you see and is then described in full in the text.

Read more

The Newcastle-Sunderland Soapbox: high times, low life

by
Jake finds the word. And a smile for SIxer
Jake finds the word. And a smile for Sixer

The scoreline bears repeating over and again: Newcastle United 0 Sunderland 3. It was a wonderful team performance and it seems beyond belief that Alan Pardew should place such store by the wrongly disallowed Newcastle goal when Howard Webb had spared his side two, perhaps three first-half penalties, the likelihood of an early Sess goal and a sending off. It also seems beyond belief that in 2013, humanity can still find enough zero-intelligence specimens to beat up a city centre, their own city centre at that though it wouldn’t actually make it seem more civilised had their spite been vented somewhere else, because a football game has been emphatically lost. Pete Sixsmith offers the right mixture of high praise and schoolmasterly scorn …

Read more