We’re back on first-name terms – the absence of a “Dear Colin” was just an oversight – but Steve’s latest …
Almost every week Pete Sixsmith offers his inimitable seven-word verdict on our games. Even when a great start at home …
We persuaded ourselves a double was possible. Sadly, after a pulsating first half in which Sunderland played a full part in the entertainment, Chelsea simply proved too strong for us …
Gary Bennett, on BBC Radio Newcastle, was very worried as the early part of the second half saw Chelsea “banging on the door”, as he put it, almost at will.
Tonight we play Chelsea and the players will commemorate the day 75 years ago that a Sunderland goalkeeper took a kick to the face that did not just end his career but cost him his life. Luke Harvey insisted that Salut! Sunderland should mark the anniversary and he was right …
As the transfer window slammed shut with an almighty bang, and you can’t deny it did, p eople up and down the country are analysing the effects of their teams’ transfer dealings. Not to mention the fact that someone is trying to surgically remove the grin from David Craig’s face after he got to spend the entire evening discussing his favourite subject: Newcastle United.
So it ended without that extra striker coming our way. That leaves some of us feeling a little nervous, but Steve Bruce seems content with the business he’s done and with his resistance to the idea of panic measures to fill a temporary gap up front. Jeremy Robson looks at events elsewhere in the climax to one of the world’s craziest trade fairs …
The transfer window has always been controversial.
Whoever it serves hadn’t quite been figured out until this one. Most managers seemed to hold the view that it didn’t help anyone much as the prices demanded for players during January was artificially high and that the clubs’ finances would face less of a strain during the summer months.
Long ago, in the days of two points for a win, we started our last game of the season four points ahead of our promotion rivals Chelsea, and playing them at home. They’d win their game in hand, we knew that (and they did so, 7-0 against Pompey) but a point would see us up. Pete Sixsmith pauses from revelling in the weekend transfer fillips to remember the goal off a Chelsea “middle leg” that left us heartbroken …
Great weekend. Bring on the Blues.
When did we last sign a player from Inter Milan? That’s an easy one – never. We have now, with the arrival of Sulley Muntari from the San Siro.
When did we last sign a player who had a Champions League Winners medal from the previous season? A tad harder that one. We have done it once, in 1981 with Ian Bowyer, so we must hope that Muntari’s stay on Wearside is altogether more successful than that of the ginger haired Forest midfielder, who had an awful time at Roker Park.
We want a re-run of Dec 4 1999 so please let the Everton cup game have tired them out; he wants Malouda to clinch a 1-0 revenge win. David Harding*, a Fleet Street foreign editor, has supported Chelsea since early boyhood and has written a book about a special hero, Gianfranco Zola,. After yesterday’s sampler, this is the full interview with refreshing thoughts on money-driven success, this season’s Premier shakeup, the Darren Bent transfer and Sunderland players he’d welcome in Blue …
Salut! Sunderland:
Thrashed at home by Sunderland. We were ecstatic, but did subsequent results for Chelsea make it less an achievement than it seemed?
Not at all. I am not saying this to be polite but Sunderland’s performance that day was one of the best by an away team at Stamford Bridge in recent seasons. The passing and movement was wonderful. Onuoha’s goal would be replayed constantly if his name was spelt Rooney. Welbeck was sensational that day. If I was a Sunderland fan the thing I would have cherished most after my joy/laughter at the scoreline had finally died down was the performance. It showed there is a real team there, not an XI capable of fashioning a one-off result. It ranks alongside the Inter Milan (0-1, though it should have been more), Everton (3-3, Fellaini was magnificent) and Liverpool (0-1 in 2008) games in recent years in terms of away teams’ performances at the Bridge.
I don’t think our other many defeats this season should diminish the achievement. We were dire against Liverpool and Wolves, lucky at Blackburn but Sunderland thrashed us. It was notable also that it was the first time I can remember a Steve Bruce team coming to Stamford Bridge and attacking.
For the latest feature in Salut! Sunderland‘s “Who are You?” series, David Harding, a Chelsea fan who has written books on Gianfranco Zola and, er, A**n She**r, covers a lot of ground: from his club’s Unloved status and Abramovich’s billions to his thoughts on cheating and Sunderland (positive) and Newcastle (not). He sympathises with the late Ian Porterfield (our hero, less successful as the Blues’ manager) but drools over another of those Sunderland lads who never played for his home town team …
Tuesday’s match still seems ages away, so stand by for a long buildup.
At the end of the season before last, we faced Chelsea at home on the last day, threatened with relegation if we lost and both Newcastle United and Hull won. Luckily, and it was luck since we predictably lost our game (3-2), they both lost and it was a case of Toon Doon. Ahead of next week’s game at the Stadium of Light, which finds SAFC in hugely different spirits, we reproduce from May 2009 this article looking back at Lads v Chelsea encounters of the Peter Reid era …
Salut! Sunderland: May 2009
So we saved the biggest, scariest matchday of the season for last. The performance at Portsmouth (defeated 3-1) reinforced doubts about our ability to claw our own way out of trouble. We approached the Chelsea game with justified trepidation. Yet it hadn’t been so long since we’d seemed to be beating them for fun.
The Salut! Sunderland headline back then was: Lads v Chelsea: what’s the likeliest outcome – 0-4, 4-1, 1-0, 4-2?
Did anyone else hear Stan Collymore’s howls of joy – “Get in …….!!!!!” – as Aston Villa grabbed a late equaliser against Chelsea?
TalkSport was asking listeners the other day whether they thought Collymore was out of order to react as he did to the crucial goal scored by the team he has always supported and once played for.
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