Beating a Munster XI 2-1 in our first pre-season friendly was an acceptable start to the build-up to a new Premier League season. Now for mighty Darlington.
Martyn Waghorn’s encouraging performance – scoring both Sunderland goals – was marred by a late injury that meant he left the field on a stretcher. I have no precise news on how serious it may be, but Steve Bruce said afterwards that the immediate thinking was that “he’ll be OK”.
Sunday was the night the Netherlands, with complete premeditation, killed football, or at least did their level best to do so. Everyone, except their own short-sighted and indignant fans, knows this to be true, including – as Jeremy Robson, pictured with his young ‘un, points out – a certain Dutch master of the Total Football at which his country once excelled …
I’ve always been a huge admirer of Johann Cruyff.
As a player, he was sublime. The now famous “Cruyff turn” which he introduced to the world in 1974 is a practice drill for aspiring footballers the world over. Hard to believe that up to 40 years ago, this move had never been witnessed on a football field.
In another of our reflective glances at the World Cup, Bill Taylor starts and finishes with the sort of welcome a prisoner gives when told years have been knocked off his sentence. Four years off World Cup football – and the thuggishness, at the end, of a once-refined footballing nation – is maybe the least reward Bill can expect for getting the winners and runners-up spot on …
Ah well, at least we get another four years off before we have to go through this again. And the REAL football starts in five weeks.
There has been some good, some great football played during this World Cup but there have also been far more terrible moments than there should have been. Many of which were crammed into the final’s seemingly interminable 120 minutes.
It’s over. Well done South Africa. Congratulations Spain. And here, using the letters of the host nation, is the first of our looks back on the 2010 tournament …
S
– Spain, worthy winners on the night, and just about overall, in a generally unimpressive event
So SPAIN are top of the world, winners of the 2010 World Cup after at one stage looking more like heading home in disarray. But South Africa confounded so many people with the way it handled the event – think back to all those warnings, and not just from tabloid newspapers, of the likely security headaches – that it deserved to host a better final than the lame, petulant affair mustered by Spain and the Netherlands. Yet Spain generally played the better football, and triumphed with a late, late winner from Iniesta. The Dutch claimed injustice, a missed offside, but deserved nothing better after their cynical, ill-tempered display …
I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday’s game. It was played in an excellent spirit, there was a lot of good football and it ended up with five goals. To top it off, I went home and watched another cracker between Germany and Uruguay on the tattie field aka as Port Elizabeth.
A good answer to anyone who thought the third place final a fairly meaningless part of the World Cup. To watch and hear the Germans following the game in a seafront Med bar in France, you’d have thought Muller & Co had won the trophy. But fair play to them, it was a cracking game with drama from one of the tournament’s brightest lights, Diego Forlan, right to the end. Bill Taylor thinks it may turn out to have been THE final …
Let us hope Jeremy Robson changed his mind about not watching the so-called “bronze medal” match between Germany and Uruguay.
Otherwise, he missed a terrific game – good end-to-end, cut-and-thrust football with five well-taken goals and both Diego Forlan and Thomas Müller notching their fifth of the tournament.
Where to go for a Spanish ‘Who Are You?’ in response to Edgar Meyer’s Dutch preview of the 2010 World Cup final. Marta in Belfast? “Typical kneejerk fan – probably couldn’t name any players,” said her husband. The tapas bar I like so much in Ealing? It’s Portuguese. Let’s try the Spanish Embassy in London then. And into our lives, with many thanks to the press office for putting us his way, came Benjamin Leyton* a fan of Cadiz, a Chelsea steward and, best of all, a man who admires Sunderland and Darren Bent. Three-nil to Spain, he reckons …
At one stage, people were saying Spain might go out at group stage. Now you are a step away from winning the World Cup – what went right?
Tomorrow Salut! Sunderland brings you a very positive view of Spain, as you’d expect since it is our Who Are You? feature in which a Spanish supporter is interviewed; Jeremy Robson is not so sure, and gets his retaliation in first …
What a sad indictment it is that Spain will be contesting a World Cup final.
The only pleasure to be derived from this is vicarious. It’s great for the citizens of a true football nation to see their national side in the final for the very first time.
Edgar Meyer – Eddie G to pals – is a passionate Feyenoord fan, which will instantly endear him to those Sunderland supporters who established loose links with followers of that club a few years ago (probably a result of Mackems finding work in Rotterdam). There’s also a hint of Spanish in Eddie’s cosmopolitan family background, but he’s paying the price for earlier good fortune by living, for now, in Doncaster. Oh, and he’s approaching Sunday’s final in confident mood …
Salut! Sunderland: Not a classic World Cup, in most people’s eyes, but your country is in the final. Are you surprised to have got through or were you always confident?
I knew we’d reach a far round, definitely the quarters, maybe the semis, when we ended up with Brazil in the Quarters and beat them, I got alot more confident about going all the way.
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