Gareth Bale

Tottenham Hotspur v SAFC ‘Who are You?’: they thought they had problems

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Jake demands answers
Jake demands answers

At ESPN, I have suggested that Gus Poyet tries to get his hands on the Edison wax cylinders on which Harry Houdini, not Harry Hood, recorded a description of one his greatest escape acts a century ago this year. He could then play it repeatedly to the team before Monday night’s game at Spurs. As our grasp on Premier status gets ever weaker, we come across Marc Aron*, one of the Tottenham fans responsible for the e-spurs site (@e_spurs at Twitter) with a mission to ‘bring N17 closer to fans around the globe’. He’d find few SAFC supporters to share his assessment of our Jozy, based on what we’ve seen …

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How Dare We? Will the real Gareth Bale, Tottenham’s sinning saint, stand up?

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Jake suspects Salut! Sunderland is up to making mischief
Jake suspects Salut! Sunderland is up to making mischief

Salut! Sunderland has always felt perfectly entitled to stick its nose into other people’s business. We’re Sunderland supporters but also have views on football generally, whether it’s Pete Sixsmith after one of his non-league excursions or Ken Gambles demanding compulsory wearing of pink mittens by shirtpullers and goggles by divers of all teams. These impertinent observations will henceforth appear under the How Dare We? banner. Did I say something about divers? ….

The look of pained innocence on Gareth Bale’s face was priceless. “Me! Dive? You’ve got the wrong man, guv,” you could almost hear him telling the ref, Antonio Miguel Mateu Lahoz though plain Antonio Mateu will do.

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Tottenham Soapbox: a lesson for galloping Gareth from another Welsh maestro

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Jake captures the moment
Jake captures the moment

If Pete Sixsmith was unimpressed by Gareth Bale’s latest attempt to prove that possession of towering skills brings an entitlement to dive, he wants cruel, unusual and inhuman punishments introduced for the sort of theatrics shown by Defoe. As for Bale, he’s big club flavour of the month so MOTD pundits naturally sided with him; the least hint of contact, however trivial and even innocent, apparently means the player can go down to claim a penalty (as opposed to completing a superb run with a great goal). They were wrong. Pete nevertheless acclaims a strong Spurs performance that brought Sunderland down to earth a little after the heroics against Man City …

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Voice of America: hardly on the Armstrong scale but now target football cheats

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Jake longs for stars in stripes

The downfall of Lance Armstrong has set people thinking and talking about sporting cheats. Salut! Sunderland has banged on about it for years, earning the admiration of some readers but irritating others. Trying to con the referee is admittedly on a different scale to the systematic use of performance-enhancing drugs*, but it is a scourge of modern football all the same. For a partisan site to campaign on such issues and keep a straight face, it has to be willing to recognise the blatant Gyan (often), Bent (sometimes) or Larsson (at Wolves) dive just as clearly as it sees it in opponents, and we have tried to be consistent. Our friend out west, Robert Simmons, believes football could learn a useful lesson from his side of the pond …

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Arsène Wenger, Gareth Bale and the cheating legacy of Don Revie’s Leeds

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(Image: Timothy Boyd)


When Salut! Sunderland hammers on about cheating in football, and declares that any diving and feigning of injury is beyond the pale and not just when committed by opponents, the world is silent. When Arsène Wenger says something similar, everyone sits up and pays attention.

That is naturally as it should be. Not only is Wenger a top voice in football, deserving of a serious hearing when he makes a serious point; his call, reported with big headlines today, for an end to the conning of referees also sounds a little like a Damascene conversion.

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Spurs ‘Who are you?’: on Gareth Bale and giants past

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All poor Jeff Beck, famously a fan of Tottenham Hotspur, did was to receive an invitation to which he has not yet responded. A missed career break? Don’t worry Becks, we’ll fit you in for the return game. The silver lining is supplied by David Sapsted*. Sappers to his mates, of whom I am one. The top British journo, and one-time Spitting Image gagwriter, drools over some of the current White Hart Lane crop. We forgot to ask who ‘appy ‘arry gets to assume goalkeeper-maiming duties in Defoe’s absence …

Salut! Sunderland:
Why do you reckon Jeff Beck failed to answer our invitation to answer these questions?

Well, he’s everywhere and nowhere, baby. Besides, he’s even older than me and probably forgot.

So is Gareth Bale due a bad match?

I’ve been a massive fan of Bale’s since I first saw him a few years ago when he was playing for Southampton at QPR. He was about eight at the time. But while everyone raves – quite rightly – about his stunning performances against Inter, he had a quiet game at Manchester United and was effectively neutralised for most of the 90 minutes by Phil Neville during the Everton game at the Lane a fortnight or so back. So he has bad days, good days and some really great days. You Sunderland lot better hope that if he doesn’t have a bad day, then the worst you have to endure is merely one of his good days.

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