Picture: neloqua

With an amazing season over, fans can head for the beach or sit back and relax, occasionally checking out the latest transfer rumours in the papers and chatrooms. But for supporters’ club organisers, the close season brings plenty of work. Ian Todd*, founder of the London and Southern England branch of the SAFCSA, explains

The players, except those with international call-ups, can go on holiday, no doubt with the club’s fitness maintenance regime accompanying the Raybans and Bermuda shorts.
And the majority of fans can catch up with all of those weekend jobs which got put aside as the season reached its “Mustn’t miss this crucial game!” climax.
But for those volunteers involved in the supporters’ club movement around the country there’s little chance of a complete break.
The sales stock needs to be checked, the season’s financial accounts completed and audited, and a myriad of tidying up jobs done.
Before you know where the time has gone, it’s June 14, the fixtures for next season are out and there’s the August travel plans to make.
On the wider plane, those involved in the national supporters’ movement are planning their Annual Conference and meeting with UEFA, the FA and the Premier and Football Leagues for bipartite discussions on the relationship between the authorities and the fans and the improvements we’d like to see.

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Derby want out, too
Picture: Phillip.

Supporters of Watford, Charlton and Sheffield United may not yet be in the mood for small consolations. But whether or not it makes them feel any better, one is being offered from across the Irish Sea.

Shane Breslin’s football blog at www.eleven-a-side.com has produced a decent argument for the proposition that the Nationwide Championship is better, that is to say more attractive, passionate and exciting, than the Premiership.

He cites six key reasons in support of his claim: five of them being the theatre of the playoffs, the unpredictability of success and failure, the abundance of goals, a relative absence of simulation (also known as cheating) and also the relative absence – in the Premiership – of fair play.

The sixth reason, of course, is Sunderland.

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If Don Hutchison, Kevin Phillips, Lee Clark and Allan Johnston ever felt they could have done with a spot of advice on how to handle the odd jeer or two from Sunderland supporters, Joe Simpson would have been the man to turn to. He knows what it is like.

Joe has never played for Newcastle, still less supported them. To the best of his knowledge, he has committed no other crime against Sunderland.

And yet he didn’t mind a bit being singled out for attention during the opening match of the 2001-2002 season, against Ipswich, at the Stadium of Light.

Invited onto the pitch to make the halftime lottery draw. Joe was introduced as “evil Alex Swinton”. The 47,370 crowd – does my headline underestimate the Ipswich support by suggesting they brought 370? – rose to the bait with a chorus of what he calls “pantomime booing”.

But they would not have barracked him for real. Despite the strong echoes of Manchester in his accent – he was only six when his mainly moved here from Peterlee – Joe is a wholehearted Sunderland fan.

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Talk about keeping the faith.

Not even at the start of last season, but four straight defeats into it, Steve Cram – ace distance champion, BBC athletics commentator and president of the London and Southern England branch of the Sunderland Supporters’ Association – decided to have a flutter.

He did not put a fiver on when Niall Quinn might sack himself as manager, or on the identity of the man who’d replace him. He put it – and this will strike a chord with our new sponsor Boylesports – on Sunderland winning promotion. And got odds of 25-1.

The winnings paid for a decent weekend away. Steve does not say what his fellow talking head at Radio 5 Live, Mike Costello, did with his (and Mike, though not a SAFC fan, got 28-1 by shopping around).

Steve, as you might imagine, is thoroughly chuffed at the way things turned out. If you choose to read on, you will see how supporting the Lads has brought him much grief, too, entertaining as some of that grief happens to be.

I propose to leave the original article, as slightly amended by me when I posted it here, largely untouched. This is the update.

Steve kept the box he has had since Roker Park. He became gloomy, but not unduly so, in the miserable recent past, and he still admires Bob Murray for his legacy of stadium and Academy, while fully believing the time had come for a change at the top.

His dad, the retired bobby, is alive and well and is the box’s most regular user. Daughter Josephine – she would prefer me to call her Josie, I gather – and son Marcus are away at school, respectively 17 and 14 now, and both still follow the team, Josie rather more fervently than her brother.

In a school where not all her peers necessarily share her passion for football, she has persuaded an Everton-supporting head of house to make sure the common room TV is switched to Sky when Sunderland are on. She has also made Leeds her first university choice, to make trips back for games all the easier.

And Steve is buzzing about the season to come, but considers that, well as the squad did in the season just finished, Roy Keane needs to make several key acquisitions if we are to become a seriously competing top 10 sort of side.

“There are no guarantees people he brings in will perform for us as well as they have elsewhere,” he reminds us. “But Keane has such stature in the game that good players will want to come rather than having to be persuaded with the carrot of lots of money.”

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It is not often that a football supporter, even one who writes for a living, is given the best part of a page in a national newspaper to rattle on about his team. But I was convinced such an article would be of interest to people in Ireland, so sent off e-mails to the Irish Examiner (which is always associated with Roy Keane’s home territory of Cork), Irish Times and – because of the handy coincidence of a Sunday game to decide the championship – the Irish Mail on Sunday.

If no one had responded from any of those papers, I would have kept trying until I was down to the smallest, most parochial weekly rag in the land. That’s on top of approaches to radio stations, which led to a brief appearance on BBC Radio Ulster, where I naturally took care to mention Jonny Evans.

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