What a brilliant April Fool wheeze.

My friend Rachel Cooke, a bright, funny and award-winning writer on the Observer, drew on her own lifelong support of Sunderland to dream up a seemingly serious review of Alice in Sunderland. This, she said, was a brand new book exploring far-fetched links between the North East, and Wearside in particular, and Lewis Carroll and his great creation, Alice in Wonderland.

I half imagined Rachel pitching the idea at an editorial conference, seeing off a dozen other contenders from around the paper, getting the go-ahead and then composing a bogus critique that would be so good, so persuasive that it would hoodwink readers into believing it was the real thing.

It took me an entire ferry trip from one side of the Channel to the other, once I’d scoured my edition of the Observer in vain for a proper report of Cardiff 0 Sunderland 1, to get the joke. It was April 1 and I’d fallen for what the French call a poisson d’avril.

But no sooner had I decided that this must be a spoof than a text version of “phone a friend” revealed the even more shocking truth: Bryan Talbot’s work was for real, a “graphic novel” according to the publishers, Jonathan Cape, and a “wise and witty” book in the words of the newspaper’s headline writer. How could I have doubted you, Rachel?

READ ON and you’ll see that there’s a free copy of this fascinating sounding book going spare for one lucky reader of Salut! Sunderland.

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In the early evening sunshine two men pulled up, one behind the other, on the quayside at Dover.

From Wembley to the Continent
Picture: janinehealy

Both wore gallows expressions as they stepped from their cars to stretch legs while waiting to board the Calais-bound ferry.

One had taken off his 1937 replica Cup Final top and it lay along the back shelf of his car; the other still had on his gold away shirt, in which colour we had two or three hours earlier lost that momentous playoff final against Charlton.

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Do we all live in a Gary Rowell world?

Loads of Sunderland’s more vocal supporters certainly do, and so does the woman who now holds the No 1 position at Radio 2, a station that is unquestionably a success story at a time when not all things BBC are success stories. And, as you will discover as you read on, she has just been promoted again.

But let’s dwell on football for now. As Wear Down South was able to reveal back in 2003, Gary is one of two heroes in Lesley Douglas’s life.

The other is some bloke called Bruce Springsteen. Meeting him was a doddle. She is far less sure how she’d cope if she suddenly found herself being introduced to Lord Rowell of Seaham. Bruce may have a lot going for him, but he will never score a hat trick against the Mags.

(Heavy brackets time). Salut! Sunderland‘s record of getting answers from the BBC is not great, but we may yet find that she has met and become a firm friend of GR since the interview of so long ago. Watch this space.

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It was a great feeling to be in the automatic promotion spots, short-lived as it proved to be.

Second top for a couple of weeks during the layoff caused by one of those outbreaks of much less interesting football – internationals – would have been rather nice. Birmingham’s late equaliser at West Brom put paid to that.

Realistically, with Brum starting yesterday with two games in hand and level on points, we should be grateful that they dropped two.

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There is no point in pretending that 2-2 at home to Stoke at this stage of the promotion battle was anything other than a bitterly disappointing result.

The message
Picture: Daedalus42

This time, however, we were lucky. Only Preston among our promotion rivals won and we remain third top, just three points behind Birmingham and Derby, teams we have recently played well against.

And the simple fact is that teams by and large do not win all their games. Football would have little purpose if they did.

It’s bad enough that the Premiership big guns more or less believe they have God-given rights to one victory after another. Who could forget the blasé, another-day-at-the-office looks on the faces of Liverpool fans after they beat us in the 1992 FA Cup Final?

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Sunderland folklore has it that Roy Greenwood, who was nearly a very good left winger for us, screwed up a chance to join Arsenal because, if I remember it correctly, he missed the train to London for his medical.

No messing with me
Picture: Kieran’sPhotos.

Leaving aside the issue of why he would want to move to a smaller club in the first place, I should say that the story may not be true. I have come across his sister during my career (she is also a journalist), and she insists that it is not.

No doubt seems to exist in the cases of Anthony Stokes, Marlon Fulop and Tobias Hysen, all left behind in the North East on Friday when they failed to turn up in time for the team coach for Barnsley*.

Roy Keane – don’t you just warm to everything he has done since coming to the SoL? – said he’d warned players repeatedly about timekeeping and had decided “a line had to be drawn”.

* See the goals by reading on………

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Our Tim
Picture: torchappeal

Top writer, lyricist and broadcaster that he is, Sir Tim Rice has won plenty of plaudits and awards.For his real career break, however, he was chosen as the very first subject in the series of Celebrity Supporter interviews for 5573, the magazine of the London branch of the SAFC supporters’ association (later renamed Wear Down South).

As I pointed out at the time, near the end of 2000, Tim had an important quality in common with others who follow Sunderland: he can hardly be called a glory seeker.

The interview with the man who, as the composing partner of Andrew Lloyd Webber, created Evita, took place in exciting times – the second of our seventh top Premiership seasons.

But Tim* is no fair weather or bandwagon-jumping fan; he has been fond of Sunderland since boyhood.

* With 5573‘s unrivalled access to the stars, first name terms came naturally….I am renewing contact with Tim and will update this posting if he gets back with more news of his life as a supporter, though Wikipedia reports that he was awarded a honorary doctorate by Sunderland Uni at a ceremony at the SoL in Nov 2006 and was named a Disney Legend in 2002.

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