Towards the end of last season, not quite a year ago so not at the very end, Burton Albion visited the Stadium of Light, won 2-1 and sent Sunderland down for the second successive season.
The fact that most of us were already resigned to relegation made it little easier to stomach and the Netflix documentary Sunderland Til I Die captured the misery in all its raw intensity.
With a break this weekend it’s time to revisit our “Ones to watch”.
If you’ve been following this series you’ll remember that we’re tracking six clubs over the course of the season. The six were chosen by a people’s vote, that new tool of democracy, with the club which came top of the poll – Coventry City – also providing a baseline against which the other five will be compared.
If you’re wondering how Coventry came to be chosen click the hyperlinks at the bottom of the page. (And if you want to see how I’ve followed our selected teams in previous seasons you can follow this link ).
Malcolm Dawson writes…..I spent the weekend catching up some of my old muckers from the East Midlands, two of whom …
Pete Sixsmith was looking forward to the weekend, not just because of the prospect of a decent game but also because of the prospect of a visit to one or two well-liked pubs.
I’m not sure if those pubs were all pre-match or if he was expecting to take one in afterwards. And I’m not sure if he’d want to do that now because, from the seven word text he sent immediately on the whistle, it wasn’t just the result that wrecked his weekend, it was the whole game:
John McCormick writes: I wondered how Pete Sixsmith would approach this one, given that it’s less than a year since we were at Burton. Not much could have changed in under a year, surely.
Well, maybe, maybe not. We have new owners, a new manager and a host of new players while Burton just have a host of new players, so some things are different.
However, the pubs and the beer are still good and Pete’s writing is as fine as ever:
Monsieur Salut writes: Dave Child*, an expert on football stadium pies as well as doing his bit for local radio, is a fine ambassador for his club, Burton Albion, the town itself and its celebrated beer. Last season, he rose twice to the ‘Who are You?’ occasion, attending both games (we won there; they sent us down by taking revenge at the Stadium of Light) but also giving seriously good pre-match interviews to Salut! Sunderland. So it felt no hardship to return to Dave after he was proved right in his prediction that we’d go down together …
UPDATE: the good news for readers waiting for prize mugs is that all those known to Monsieur Salut, and having provided delivery addresses and the names of players they wish to appear on the dressing room image, have had theirs ordered today. They should arrive soon. Anyone feeling left out, having been promised a mug and not received it, should let me know, using the contact form or simply by leaving a comment.
First things first, says Monsieur Salut. I have a backlog of mugs to send out to winning Guess the Score entrants and am struggling to persuade a wretched advertiser to pay for a sponsored post published almost two months ago. He faces a significant risk of being “outed” on these pages, as a warning to others, if the money does not show up sharpish.
We get the odd proper advertisement, and businesses from the North East, like the one you see to the right of the page, are warmly welcome.
Some of the content supplied by way of sponsored posts is of a reasonable quality and I do my best to make the others at least presentable. Out and out stinkers are rejected.
But it’s a process that may be seen as a necessary evil that helps such a site as Salut! Sunderland pay its way. And that includes the cost of competition prizes, for which we no longer have a sponsor.
So for this week at least, we revert to a just-for-fun edition of Guess the Score for the first time this season.
That’s my Scrooge moment out of the way.
UPDATE: we saw the poll had grown, improbably, to 11,000+ votes with Coventry way out in front on 26 per cent. Couldn’t blame Jimmy Hill this time but something was clearly up. For the culprits, go to the Coventry site Sky Blues Talk … but don’t get too cross as our lot would gladly have done the same to them. The poll, unsurprisingly, is suspended …
After Colin reposted our “who’s going up?” poll (on the left, below) in one of the Question and Answer sessions with our owners there was brief flurry of voting, as you might have expected given the number of visitors we had. And then things slowed down until, by the weekend, things were at a trickle, although votes were and are still coming in. Again, this was to be expected as the eyes of the football world were on Russia, where eight or nine ex-Sunderland players were taking part in the World’s most prestigious competition outside the Third Division. We now have over 800 votes cast, which is enough to be going on with, although Colin in his gut feeling poll, had almost as many when only one vote was allowed per person.
When I first put this poll up
, a mere week ago, I wrote
“this is predominantly a Sunderland site and we aren’t claiming results are totally unbiased… …Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to say that SAFC fans have not been blindly optimistic.”
After only a week I would not able to add a lot to this statement, were it not for two things. The first is that the poll was tagged to promote it to all League One fans for over 24 hours before it was promoted on our facebook page and then on Colin’s subsequent posts on this site. This gave us a small (very small, as it happens) hint of what the whole of the League One fanbase might think. The second was that Colin’s own poll closed, with some findings we can bring to bear on this one.
The 4th signing of the summer revolution has been announced on the official website just as most of us were …
