Tasmin: keeping faith

A warm welcome to anyone arriving in one of those periodic waves of fellow fans following a link from Ready To Go’s SMB forum.

The topic is famous fans of Sunderland AFC, familiar territory for Salut! Sunderland, where I have added to the work I previously did for 5573 (then Wear Down South), the newsletter of the London and Southern England branch of the SAFC Supporters’ Association.

Of course, I could add that if some of the people posting to that SMB thread had already been here, and read the abundant material on Celebrity Supporters that I have built up, they would not make the mistakes evident in, for example, this comment by “Roughy”:

I think there’s a difference between supporting us and just being born near Sunderland. I knew Dave Stewart in the early days and he never expressed an interest in football, Kate Adie was born here but has never said she’s a supporter.
Heather Mills says quite often that she was a Sunderland fan in her youth (and as people who’ve seen my act will know I’m know fan of the monoped witch!)
Mensi is and always has a been a supporter
Tamsin Archer despite coming from Bradford is a fan as her boyfriend/husband John Hughes (?) who wrote Sleeping Sattallite can often be seen at away games
The Tim Rice and Peter O’Toole stuff has been done to death I think they just “chose” us as their team but haven’t really been fans.

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Sit down lad, I can’t see. On second thoughts, stay put*
Picture: dkodigital

How did you spend the day after Wigan?

Since I have always regarded Sunderland as the Durham county football team, I hope as many as possible of you were following Durham County Cricket Club’s excellent victory in the Friends Provident Trophy final at Lord’s.

Some SAFC nuts, Pete Sixsmith included (hence my stand-in role on Sixer’s Sevens) were glad to have been there yesterday too, instead of at Wigan. And who can blame them?

I could not follow the cricket, but I did devote a few minutes to filling in my renewal form for the London and South Eastern branch of the SAFC Supporters’ Association. It was a necessary act of faith after the dismal events of the day before.

Passion for your club does not depend on results, nice as it is when results go well. The passion is unconditional.

Our new Irish – and any other – fans have to realise that while supporting the Lads is never boring, it also brings no certainties of success. Plenty of us have experienced those play-off blues, relegation sickeners, thwarted promotion bids and the rest.

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Scourge of the WAGS
Picture: Kieran’sPhotos.

Either the heart or the head cheered wildly for Roy Keane when he made his remarks about weak players under the thumbs of their shopaholic, London-obsessed WAGS.

But not, from where I’m sitting, both head and heart at the same time.

I was ecstatic to be back in Sunderland on Saturday to see a winning return to the Premiership. And where was I not much more than 48 hours after the final whistle? On a Ryanair flight’s final approach to Toulon airport. To Mme Salut, St Tropez – or near enough for us to be able to afford it – has the edge on Shildon.

Keano’s remarks, which I imagine will have been warmly applauded throughout the North East, hark back to another age for anyone married to a remotely modern woman.

It doesn’t matter whether she wants to shop in Bond Street, Milan or the Metro Centre. She just insists on being consulted, not being treated as part of the furniture. And being a woman, she’ll take all that consultation and attention and still complain that she’s being treated like part of the furniture.

The good old days may well have been when you could, with a straight face, recite the little verse:

A woman, a child, a dog all three. The more you beat them, they better they be.

But each component of that recipe for betterment would land you in court these days.

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In it together, but seeing things differently
Picture: krisread

As the goals went in last night, the text messages from St Andrew,s dried up. Several minutes after the final whistle, we were still trailing 1-0 according to my mobile phone, the normally reliable Sixer’s Sevens service having gone AWOL.

There’s always BBC Radio Newc**tle. Down in my den at home in the south of France sit two computers. The older, cheaper one inexplicably gives clearer, louder reception while the commentary on the newer model is a few seconds ahead. I chose the slow but audible oldie.

Talk about people attending the same games and seeing different ones. It took me back to careless driving cases at Bishop Auckland Magistrates’ Court, when one motorist would swear this happened as vehemently as the other claimed the opposite.

To Gary Bennett, a passionate Sunderland ex-player and fan whose summaries I enjoy and respect, we were “not at the races”, “probably didn’t deserve a draw”, “got out of jail”. For him, the positive was that we’d avoided defeat despite playing woefully.

Hence the gloomy tone of my running updates on Salut! Sunderland as Sixer’s Stand-in.

I cannot recall it all word-for-word, but it went from something like “0-1…poor marking…playing badly” to “Chopra out of nowhere….” to “Chopra leveller not enough” to “Chopra, John steal draw from drab performance”. All based on the critical but realistic sounding comments of Gary Bennett.

Finally, Sixer’s verdict arrived, not once but twice: “Thoroughly deserved. Chopra’s now one of us.”

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These two delightful young ladies* were a lot more confident before the game than some of us. I should know because when I chanced upon them as I hurried towards the ground, they told me so.

But no one is getting carried away. Nyron Nosworthy had his feet firmly on the ground when accepting his Man of the Match award on Sky (he wasn’t MOTM in truth, though not too far behind Paul McShane, who was.)

One game, one win. That’s all it really amounts to. If by the end of the week, we are looking at three wins or two wins and a draw, that would be different, but still not enough – given who we face after that – to warrant premature celebrations.

But whatever certain<a href=”http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml;jsessionid=0W5FQUMZMMYLRQFIQMGCFF4AVCBQUIV0?xml=/sport/2007/08/12/sfgsun112.xml&posted=true&_requestid=527144
“> sour London-tinged reports might have you believe, this was not an unimpressive performance and it was not a dire game, unless you dearly wanted the scoreline to work to script.

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Paul McShane: Salut! Man of the Match
Picture: Peadar O’Sullivan

About 20 minutes to go, and on comes Michael Chopra.

Read Sixer’s Sevens. Pete (Sixsmith) didn’t just pluck his seven-word verdict out of nowhere in the euphoria of a victory that put us briefly top of the Premiership.

At that moment when Chopra, Mag turned honorary Mackem, took the field, Pete said: “Just let him grab the winner in the 89th minute and all that bile will be forgotten.”

Okay. It took Chops – as Keano calls him – two or three minutes longer, until the dying seconds of time added on. And then he buried the ball as sweetly as you’d want a striker to do, after superb work – on the right, would you believe – by Ross Wallace, who’d played all game on his natural left.

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King Charlie: mine, all mine
Picture: Peadar O’Sullivan

Well, the proof of the pudding is about to be served……….

I am writing this in advance of today’s exciting, and desperately nervous, debut back in the Premiership.

Yes, I’ll be there, provided the arrangements for a crazy weekend return to the UK hold up. And so will Pete Sixsmith; please bear in mind it can be a lot easier – for obvious reasons – for me to get Sixer’s Sevens up when I am NOT at the game than when I am.

So Pete’s verdict will appear, but I cannot say exactly when.

Something else should appear online today with more certainty: a new SAFC website called hawaythelads . The man behind it, Andy Dawson, has also written a book, due out in September on the Quinn/Keane/Drumaville revolution. It’s called An Irish Uprising: How Keano and the Mighty Quinn Saved Sunderland and promises to be a stonking read.

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Keano: pressure to succeed
Picture: Peadar O’Sullivan

A little while ago, Shane Breslin asked me to write an article for the Irish football website, eleven-a-side.com, of which he is the editor*. Here he returns the favour……

Spurred on by almost blanket coverage in the mass media, Irish interest in the Sunderland story is holding its own against the climax of the Gaelic games season. But whether there will be any longevity to the dalliance remains to be seen.

Last weekend, approximately 110,000 supporters – or, if you will, about wo per cent of the island’s population – turned up at Croke Park as the All-Ireland football and hurling championships reached the knock-out stages. This Saturday and Sunday, with the Dublin hordes snaffling up tickets for their football quarter-final against Derry, that figure should reach 140,000.

But far from being drowned in the swirling rapids of the GAA’s season-end, the Sunderland experience is doing rather more than hanging in there, with whole pages of national broadsheets devoted to it.

Saturday’s Irish Times tried to tap into the growing interest in the Black Cats – I hesitate to call it “support”, in the true sense of the word – by kicking off a weekly column, A Year on the Wear, from the North East based journalist Michael Walker.

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While waiting for belated confirmation and comment from the official SAFC site – imminent surely – on our capture of Craig Gordon, and indeed while clinging to the hope that more news on the transfer front still lies between now and 12.45pm on Saturday, the temptation to add two more pictures from the Irish tour was irresistible.

And if you are thinking to yourself, “but I see four photographs”, you are right. There is a very good reason for the third and fourth, which I’ll come to in a second.

First things first. Pete Horan, who guided Salut! Sunderland‘s Pete Sixsmith around Ireland sent me an e-mail attaching, as he puts it, “a photo of two dummies” whereas I swear I can count four.

“The photo was taken at Galway Races on Tuesday evening where Sixer’s proven system was to put all of our money on the first race which had a runner called Mr Bones,” Pete (H) reports. “Unfortunately, Mr Bones was as slow as the ‘Flying Pig’ himself, to be sure. I took over betting responsibility after that and we made a modest recovery.”

Both Petes, and a third SAFC follower, can also be seen at the Cliffs of Moher. Look closely, says Pete (H), and you can just about make out Craggy Island in the background.

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If only……
Picture: dkodigital

That was the kind of result we could live with, 1-1 against Juventus in our final pre-season friendly before the opening match, Spurs at home on Saturday.

All the more creditable because we held a lead until the very closing stages and even then had chances to win the game. Fortunately, one of the two photos by “Dkodigital” – he’s a supporter based in Ferryhill; my thanks to him for permission to reproduce his work – captured the scoreboard at just the right time.

Of the reactions I have seen, Roy Keane’s is perhaps the most important, and he managed to combine cautious optimism with realism, while praising the players for making such a good shot of it.

Pre-match lineups
Picture: dkodigital

But with nearly 26,000 present at the Stadium of Light and many more watching on TV, the views of fans are also worth recording, and I offer two……

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