West Ham v Sunderland: ‘what did Bruce do to our worldbeating McCartney?’

A meaningless end-of-season match, a pointless edition of “Who are You?”? … Only in the sense that they’re down and we’re safe. Beyond that, Sunderland have masses of pride to play for – we cannot finish lower than 14th but 14th would represent failure – and Steve Bruce’s team should want to preserve their one notable achievement: unbeaten in London. For their part West Ham players have to show their fans they care about restoring the club to the Premier. And we close this season’s series on a high, with the Hammers-supporting writer and broadcaster Iain Dale*, who also runs the West Ham Til I Die blog. He is optimistic about a quick return, sees us as a similar club that will always collapse into dire runs and eulogises the surely departing Scott Parker …

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Who are you? We’re West Ham

sam

Sam Haseltine* is one of the brains behind Football United, new host for Salut! Sunderland and other sites. He has been solid as a rock in the process of transferring our archive across from its old home at Typepad to WordPress (and cannot be blamed if some text arrived in garbled form and a few pictures don’t look quite right!). He’s also a passionate Hammers fan, runs the fans’ site West Ham Process and is deaf to my request that his club delays its revival until after we play them on Saturday …


Not a great start to the season. Are you beginning to get worried?

You’re right, not the best of starts. I take confidence in knowing we have a whole three more points than Spurs did at this same point last year! I’m not getting worried just yet, feeling a little down as it wasn’t quite what we expected going into the season. After our run of form at the tail end of last year, we were confident that it would continue into this year, hopefully making us serious Europa League place contenders. I would still put my neck on the line and say we will be there or there abouts this year.

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