Who are you? We’re Spurs (2)

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Thanks to all you Spurs fans. Thanks even more if you recognise our greater need for points (just now) and grant us an away win on condition you still finish much higher.

The response to my launch of Who Are They? has been tremendous, with articles lined up for future games and a great bunch of postings for more immediate use.

Sappers’s witty offering is already up there and further pieces from Logan Holmes and “Paxton Lee” will appear over the next 24 hours, with yet another, from Greg Meyer, also promised.

Three is obviously too many. Four is absurd. It will never happen again. But this is a launch after all and how can you turn away such kind and compelling stories of and reflections on the history, recent and less so, of our two great clubs? There is truly fascinating reading in these essays.

I will find a way of making the multiple Spurs pieces easily viewable without cluttering up the main postings column. If I can. But with mentions of Raich Carter, Chris Waddle, Paul Stewart, Jimmy Greaves and Ben Alnwick to come, it’s worth sticking around whatever my struggles with blogosphere technology.

With the exception of my very good friend David Sapsted’s words, already posted, these items appear thanks to Jim Duggan, who runs the Topspurs site. And no sooner had I thanked Jim for being such a gent than this arrived (from Jim):

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Who are you? We’re Spurs (1)

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See also: A tale of two Keanes
What Kevin Ball did with the goal at his mercy
That’s 100 competitive games between SAFC &s Spurs

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Sunderland beating Spurs in the first game of the season was the last thing Londoncentric sports writers expected. Weren’t Tottenham going to be one of the big performers this season? David Sapsted – Sappers to his pals – certainly thought so

CAST your mind back to last August, if you will. There was a foot and mouth outbreak in Surrey, fires raging across southern California and – as ever at that time of year – the pulses of Spurs fans were racing notably faster than normal.

The 2007-8 season, we told ourselves, was going to be the one when we finally fulfilled all that promise…our team of perpetual under-achievers (only thwarted, if you recall, from a place in the Champions’ League a few months earlier by some dodgy lasagne on the eve of the crucial West Ham game) were going to come good at last.

No doubt about it. Absolutely none. We were all supremely confident and, for the first time in a lot of years, had good cause to be so.

That supreme confidence endured almost the entire 90 minutes of the opening match at the Stadium of Light. OK, so it was not going to be a win, but an away point against a team with a Keane sense of purpose would still augur well.

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Soapbox: loony toons

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One dictionary definition of magpie is “idle chatterer”. That probably sums up Kevin Keegan quite well. But Pete Sixsmith, writing before news broke that the circus was coming back to toon, found plenty for scope for fun at the expense of KK’s long line of predecessorsKeegan

There’s a classic Fawlty Towers moment when Basil is having a dialogue with O’Reilly, the useless Irish builder, and O’Reilly says to Fawlty: “Calm down, Mr Fawlty. There’s always someone who’s worse off than you.” Basil replies “Is there? Well, I’d like to meet him, I could do with a good laugh.”

Now, things are not great for us. We are in our traditional relegation place, some of the players we have brought in this summer are clearly not good enough and there are a few people beginning to have doubts about the manager. But there at least 50,000 worse off than us and they are all wearing Black and White as the Great Mag Fiasco Show rides into town again.

For here is a club for which the word Fiasco might have been invented. The owner thinks he is a fan and wears a (Sports Direct bought) shirt to prove it. But he isn’t really; he’s from deepest Manchester United territory – Hertfordshire.

The chairman looks like someone who has wandered in from the accountant’s office and been given the job of speaking for his reclusive master without having any ideas of his own. The late lamented manager had an issue with the BBC, had never won anything in the top flight and played a brand of football that was an anathema to the cultured, educated shirt twirlers who make up the crowd. So he has to go.

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Soapbox: happy days are here again

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Sing when you’re winning? Win when you’re singing more like. It was a good enough philosophy for FDR and Pete Sixsmith reckons it’s good enough for us

The greatest of all US presidents, Franklin D Roosevelt, was also the first to have a campaign song.

Because of the Great Depression he wanted it to be positive. So he chose Happy days are here again; wherever he went, it was played.Fdr2

As a result, he won four elections, which is one less than the number of wins we have had this season, so maybe Roy is better than FDR.

There are a lot of similarities between the two; both liked dogs, both have three initials and er…. well, you get the picture. Having said that, I wouldn’t fancy FDR picking the right team for a relegation scrap at the Reebok in April.

What a good weekend for Sunderland fans.
Fulham lost again on Saturday afternoon and the other results could have been a lot worse. Then came Old Trafford and a display of such mind blowing garbage from the Mags that you almost felt sorry for the foot soldiers of the Toon Army – until, that is, you saw the overfed, underbrained ones taking their hideous shirts off and twirling them round their heads.

It was all set up for Sunday. Redknapp showed consummate common sense in staying at Pompey rather than moving north and being sacked six months later because he was not entertaining enough.

Obviously he couldn’t ride a unicycle and juggle at the same time. It reminds me of a mate at college who went to see Leonard Cohen at the City Hall but didn’t enjoy him “because he wasn’t versatile enough”.

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Roy Keane and the great transfers debate (7)

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More than one shirt to fill
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The transfer window is fast approaching its halfway point. We knew what had to be done during this period and so, with his expressed optimism about pulling off two signings by today, did Roy Keane.

Let us take stock. In (and he already was in when Keano spoke): Jonny Evans, broadly a welcome acquisition after his superb season in the heart of our Championship defence but still a long way short of proven Premiership quality. And? Er, no one so far except Quintin Fortune, whose signing – if it happened – would not quite set Wearside hearts on fire.

It would be an early candidate for understatement of the year to say that this is a pretty disappointing return from what, we were entitled to hope, was weeks of preparatory work behind the scenes to ensure the right people came to the SoL.

The best that can be said is that there is still plenty of time before the window is slammed shut in our relegation-threatened faces. The worst is that our dismal first half of the season has scarcely left us the luxury of being able to relax. We need Premiership quality now; indeed we needed it by today – before facing ‘arry’s very useful Portsmouth side.

It has always been argued that the Championship – or Second Division to give it the unfashionably accurate title by which the French, among others, still know it – is one heck of a hard league to get out of. Nonsense. We’ve done it loads of times.

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Hazey: here’s to you, my rambling boy*

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From the Ready to Go site, familiar territory to most Sunderland fans, comes two pieces of unrelated news.

The first is that the SMB (Sunderland Message Board) and Speakeasy Chatroom, sources of good lively debate but also outbursts of offensive drivel, have been shut down.

The explanatory message read simply: “Closed due to libellous posts. Hopefully back later but don’t hold your breath.”

The people responsible for depriving hundreds if not thousands of SAFC supporters of access to these forums know who they are, and how they forced the hands of Roger and his colleagues at RTG. The sheer effort put into running the site deserved better**.

But the other piece of news put the first (a minor inconvenience when all is said and done) in the shade. Hazey, well known to RTG subscribers as the man behind the spectacularly misnamed Dull Ramblings blog, had lost his spirited but unevenly matched battle with cancer.

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Soapbox: our cup runneth under

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Think 3-0 at home to Wigan was bad? Pete Sixsmith has seen worse. But it was enough to dampen his hopes of nine points from the next three Premiership homes games against Portsmouth, Birmingham and – er – Wigan. And if his shopping list (a seven point haul) proves beyond us, we’ll just have to be grateful that the South Stand at Bloomfield Road was demolished soon after this photo was taken

Contrary to popular opinion, this was not our worst home FA Cup display in living memory.

There was an absolute shocker in 1971 when the mighty Orient (as they then were) came to a cold and empty Roker Park on a Monday night and also beat us 3-0.

That game was remarkable for two things: the selection and performance of Gordon Harris, an ageing former England midfielder, at centre half where he was embarrassed by a pacy and pugnacious forward called Mark Lazarus. My memory suggests that Lazarus scored twice and Harris ended up on a free to Worksop Town at the end of the season.

Alan Brown was manager that night and was on his way down the slippery slope from the status of revered figure who had taken us to the promised land in his first spell to the dinosaur out of touch with modern football. Roy is now taking his first look at that slippery slope.

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