A couple of days from now things will be different and Pete Sixsmith will not be a feature of these pages. But that’s for the future and he’s here today.
Actually, he’s in Doncaster, from where he sent a number of texts keeping us up to date on the progress of our team, including the seven words below, which arrived shortly after the final whistle.
And don’t you wish you had been there with him?
John McCormick, writes: our ‘who to follow’ poll remained quiet, although the trickle of votes that came in over the last week did result in some changes. Sunderland and Portsmouth are clear leaders, with not much between them, after which we have Ipswich, Rotherham and Peterborough. Then come Doncaster, who edged ahead of Coventry, followed at a distance by Lincoln and Burton.
I did expect Blackpool to do better but our site appears to have attracted few of their fans. Their season tickets had reached 4,818, when I last checked, so there’s obviously life returning to this once-troubled club. That’s about twice the number sold by Coventry, whose own troubles are nowhere being resolved and who slipped out of our top six after Doncaster Rovers gained a few votes. A third troubled club, Bolton Wanderers, who might or might not be sold by the time this post goes live, also didn’t do too badly and finished in the top half of the table. I don’t know how they’ll do that with only 7 first team players but what do I know about football?
That’s interesting because on Wednesday over at Roker Report, Nick Barnes, who knows more about football than I ever will, identified Lincoln and Burton as teams that could mount a challenge to Sunderland, along with Ipswich, Portsmouth, Peterborough and Coventry. He didn’t mention Rotherham.
I could extend our watch list to eight clubs, even nine on the grounds that Donny are ahead of Lincoln and Burton in our poll, and I have added clubs during the season – Luton last season being the most recent – but it makes graphics difficult to follow. So I’m going to stick with six.
On Friday we had over 3,000 visitors, followed by a quiet weekend. Not everyone took part in our top six poll but over 1200 votes (not voters) have now been cast. That’s not bad, I suppose, for a League One fans’ site but I am expecting a few more will chip in before the season kicks off.
Early results suggest the headline I used then – for which I visited a couple of betting sites to find the promotion favourites – was on the right lines. Of the six clubs I named five are in the top spots. Lincoln (currently lingering in 8th place) are the exception with Sunderland, unsurprisingly, replacing them. There’s a gap – slight but quite evident – between the top three and the next three, after which numbers drop off, so Lincoln and Doncaster, who made last season’s playoffs and now lie seventh, have quite a bit of ground to make up.
All of the clubs in the League received votes, which I’m taking to signify that we managed a wide reach. It will be interesting to see if enough fans of so-called smaller clubs, which are predominantly towards the bottom of the poll, visit in large enough numbers to move their favourites upwards. Crowdwise, numbers are against them but we have only small numbers voting so you never know.
Last season our punters got it more or less right and correctly predicted most of the top six. Luton were missed but that was mainly down to the Coventry Ninjas, whose hijack of last year’s poll pushed them (Luton) out of the top places.
Maybe the ninjas or another club’s fans will do the same again this season. As far as I’m aware the polldaddy vulnerability that allowed multiple voting still exists and all I can do is disable the ability of readers to see the results in real time. That might change how the poll coding works (it’s built-in and can’t be changed) but it takes something away. A pity, but there we go.
I’ve got a lot on for the next few weeks so I won’t be conjuring up a novel method of tracking and displaying our chosen clubs’ progress or the lack of it. All I’ll be doing is monitoring the accretion of points for now, though I might come up with something different later in the season.
As always, your comments are welcome. We hold posts for moderation but they do go up eventually, subject to meeting commonsense rules of decency, manners, libel etc.
League One comprises 24 clubs. Three of them, Bury, Bolton and Blackpool, are entering, exiting or plodging in the clarts of receivership. Leaving them and Sunderland aside gives us twenty clubs.
I thought I’d take a look at their finances. Nothing detailed, just a skim through any entries at Companies House and a quick perusal of a search engine, enough to kill some time I have and satisfy idle curiosity. My idea was to divide the twenty into two and cover 10 clubs each time. After that matters should have moved ahead with the Lancashire Bs and Sunderland’s takeover and I should be able to revisit these four.
It has become a bit of a stuck old gramophone record, Salut! Sunderland‘s pride in a tremendous season of Who are You? interviews with opposing supporters.
Judging is at an advanced stage for our HAWAYs – annual awards for Highly Articulate Who are You?s – and with only a couple of sets of votes still awaited, front-runners are emerging.
League One has been a goldmine for the series (not forgetting our cup-game interviewees from other divisions)
As Monsieur Salut put it when writing to the judges: “I could have put them all in a hat and drawn three at random, so good have so many of the interviews been.”
@SunderlandAFC fans. Your support has been sensational. You have wanted to believe in us and have been inspirational. I appreciate a lot are frustrated with the p/offs. We can though still do this. We can reflect later but our best chance is with ur backing – together please???
— stewart donald (@stewartdonald3) May 4, 2019
A quick glance at our fellow-contenders for promotion via the playoffs shows we have Wembley previous against two of the three – and it’s not encouraging. Portsmouth beat us there in the Checkatrade Trophy final in March and plenty of us will never forget the anguish of 1998 against Charlton.
So if hoodoos exist, they need to be broken. Here’s your chance to say whether and how we’ll make a start on Saturday night.
The games are coming thick and fast as we get to the fag end and business end of the season. …
My first thought was “don’t concede early”. And we didn’t
Then I thought “get a good start”. And we did.
At 70 minutes I thought “Hang on for a clean sheet”. And we did
These were good points earned today, in a game we knew we had to win.
Pete Sixsmith (I think) will give his verdict tomorrow. Here’s his immediate post-game judgement, in seven sweet words:
