Tottenham v Sunderland: ordeals at the Lane, fun in the snow

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At roughly this time last year, Salut! Sunderland pulled together some reminiscences of visits to White Hart Lane in previous seasons. The cold snap that saw snowfall in parts of Britain today – including a few flakes in London – brought back memories of a 3-3 draw in the bleak midwinter, a good enough excuse for looking at those past encounters again …

See also: The Spurs “Who are You?”: We’ll hammer you 4-1.

Not everyone knows this, and Spurs fans would just laugh anyway. But Sunderland have won the top flight title three times as often as Tottenham. And while the down side for us is that three of our six championships came in the century before last, and the most recent was 1936, they had to wait until 1951 for the first of only two.

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Spurs v SAFC Who are You?: ‘top four beats staying above Arsenal’

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No shortage of self-confidence on the Tottenham Hotspur front. Too big a club for Darren Bent and Martin O’Neill, home bankers versus us on Sunday and heading for a third top finish at least two places ahead of Arsenal. That’s as seen by Jamie Currie*, the man behind White Hart Pain site and a regular on Ian Wright’s Absolute Radio programme, Rock ‘N’ Roll Football. He did the honours here two years ago** and we welcome him back – even if he does casually predict a 4-1 outcome …

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Luke’s World: Sunderland set an example Blackburn may follow

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Salut! Sunderland is always open to new writers. Hilary Fawcett’s marvellous account of her twin obsessions with SAFC and Bob Dylan has won deserved acclaim. Now Luke Harvey, absent from these pages for too long, returns with a reflections on Steve Bruce’s demise – and how one game summed up a second club’s need for change …

Martin O’Neill’s start as Sunderland manager ultimately ended in triumph, and he was given a good, up-close look at his predecessor’s legacy.

That’s not to say MON has inherited only negative aspects from Steve Bruce even if recent weeks on Wearside might have made that look the case. Bruce did leave our new manager a team of unified and hard working professionals, something David Vaughan and Sebastian Larsson reinforced with their goals.

It would be folly and rather disrespectful to think Bruce did not care about our team. Even against his former employers – Wigan – in what turned out to be his last game in charge, you could see he wanted to win just as badly as we, the fans, did.

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‘Canny for a lass’. Football, Dylan and me

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Let this be the first of many articles from Hilary Fawcett. The comment sections of Salut! Sunderland invariably look more elegant when our female readers weigh in with opinion on all things Sunderland AFC. As a huge fan of Bob Dylan as well as the club, Hilary would be furious if I were to say his songs sound more elegant when performed by others. Here, then, is the first in a new series of The Fawcett Saga …

Those of you who have read my posted comments might have picked up that alongside my keen support for SAFC, I also have a passion for Bob Dylan. Among many of my female friends, my twin obsessions are greeted with sighs and eye-rolling.

Often isolated in my enthusiasms, I have attempted to connect with fellow obsessives, attending Bob Dylan fan meetings only to find myself a lonely female surrounded by men waving endless lists of songs and competing over ownership of bootleg vinyl.

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A tale of three Larrsons, lots of tattoos and Bendtner’s hard-won pizza

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Time for one of Salut! Sunderland’s occasional looks abroad. Not French Fancies but Scandinavian Stars …

Salut! Sunderland has taken a while to get round to making up with Seb Larsson.

We’ll do it now but delay an olive branch in the direction of our other Scandinavian first team man, Nicklas Bendtner, until he 1) explains the pizza house shocker or 2) takes a leaf from Seb’s book and scores some winning goals.

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James McClean: Derry City, Sunderland and ‘a language we all understand’

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The quote is adapted from Phil Coulter’s song about Derry and the Troubles, The Town I Love So Well (he also co-wrote Puppet on a String but we bear no grudges). The language supporters of SAFC and Derry City understand is football, played in red and white stripes …

When Steve Bruce brought James McClean from Derry City for the the amount of money top players earn in a fortnight, our own Pete Sixsmith posed the question in an article at Salut! Sunderland: “Is he our new Johnny Crossan?”

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Blackburn Soapbox: a wild day as Rovers repulsed at the end

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Despite his highly upbeat thoughts in Martin’s Musing, our new manager will not allow himself to get carried away by a late, narrow win over relegation zone companions. With Spurs and QPR – both away – looming, Pete Sixsmith takes a measured view …

Had you seen me slumped in my seat at 4.40pm on Sunday, you would have noticed my demeanour was considerably more gloomy than that exhibited last week on various TV channels. A goal down, time slipping away and the prospect of being one rung above a hapless Bolton Wanderers, all contributed to a face and mood that made the lugubrious Jack Dee look like the ever smiling Bruce Forsyth.

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Martin’s Musings: making our own luck to beat Blackburn

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Martin O’Neill, in his first managerial Musings after a Sunderland match, rightly applauds a second half showing full of endeavour, persistence and – finally – the goals to go with those qualities. It was his deployment of Steve Bruce’s players that eventually won the game, and we were fortunate with a couple of decisions, but let us not quarrel with what ended up being the right kind of start …

Dear Colin,

I thought the players were fantastic today, for this reason and this reason alone, we were a goal behind for most of the game and then suddenly, just as you might be thinking to yourself it’s the same old story, came the second-half performance.

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Sixer’s Sevens: SAFC 2 Blackburn 1 – winning start to new era

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This is where Pete Sixsmith captures the glory and shame, hope and despair, excitement and ennui of the Sunderland matchday experience. When, rarely, Pete is absent or delayed, a supersub does it for him and the seven-word verdict is preceded by an asterisk. Pete’s full analysis of the game will usually appear within a day or two.

Martin O’Neill was in charge of SAFC for the first time today as we took on Blackburn Rovers in what our rotten run had turned into a relegation six-pointer.

The outcome, of course, was ultimately as magical at it needed to be with tough games in London coming up next.

But MON he soon enough saw the scale of the challenge he’s accepted, a first half summed in Pete’s text from the East Stand “awful even by our usual dismal standards”, a disturbing seven-word verdict on how things then stood. One down thanks to 1) O’Shea’s weak pass playing Larsson into trouble, 2) Larsson’s poor control of the pass and subsequent lunge conceding a moderately dangerous free kick, 3) our utter inability to defend set pieces handing Rovers a goal on a plate. Then MoN suffered from his predecessor’s decision to tackle the need to score in the Premier with one on-loan striker and a couple of promising kids.

It was much, much better in the second half and James McClean’s introduction injected real hope; this is a man whose pace and skill can enable him to make a mark at the top level. Vaughan’s equaliser – NB VAUGHAN’s; whoever wrote Gardner’s will be boiled in oil – was a belter and a beauty: Larsson made up for last week’s events at Wolves with a superb free kick to win the game We needed a win today. Finally, thanks to a dramatic improvement after the break, we got one.

There may be a delay in posting Martin’s Musings.

The full Sixer’s Sevens archive – see link below – sums up what all Sunderland supporters feel, from darkest gloom to sublime elation, in the words one who is usually there …

Dec 11 2011 SAFC (0) 2 Blackburn Rovers (1) 1 Sheer perseverance gives MON vital winning start

Dec 4 2011 Wolverhampton Wanderers (0) 2 SAFC (0) 1 More points sacrificed through weak, sloppy defending

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