Love them or loathe them, international breaks get in the way of the normal business of Salut! Sunderland. But for John McCormick’s sterling efforts, there has been nothing new here for days.
But that is partly a result of Monsieur Salut’s own international break, a long weekend in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city, a port with a momentous history and home to one of our own Pete Sixsmith’s younger brothers, Phil, and his charming Greek wife, Veta.
This week, Monsieur Salut has been granted time off from the ‘Who are You’ feature. Our Liverpool-based associate editor, John McCormick, found and interviewed an Evertonian and the fascinating result of their exchange will appear here tomorrow.
That leaves Guess the Score. David Miller won the Personalised Football Gifts mug as the first – and only – reader to plonk for 3-1 to us at Crystal Palace. So no rollover, just the one mug and you must have it delivered to a UK address.
The rollover Guess the Score competition for Sunderland vs Arsenal was won by our resident harbinger of doom, Bill Cowell.
The man will soon run out of space for all his prize mugs. Two more are on their way from Personalised Football Gifts, to be preceded or followed by a carefully packed box of After Eight mint chocs, for which Pete Sixsmith dug deep into his pockets to stump up the purchase price, Nestlé having been too humourless to do so itself.
What better to accompany the tea or coffee, or stronger, in your rollover pair of prize mugs than a few tasty wafer-thin mint chocolates with cream inside?
Everyone knows the drill by now, or should.
Accurately predict the score in SAFC vs Stoke City Round Two, Premier League on Saturday, be the first to post that prediction and do so before kickoff and you win a prize.
Possibly out of sequence as we await Pete Sixsmith’s magisterial analysis of SAFC vs Stoke. But the weekend is approaching, I’ve a lot on – paid-for work – so let’s get cracking with Guess the Score …
No one, it seemed, had a dour enough disposition to suggest we’d be reduced to a wretched 0-0 draw. As Jeremy Robson has pointed out on these pages, that’s now two visits to promoted sides without a goal and with no more than a point.
Even before Eric Bowers popped up to say I must have overlooked a clearly invalid 0-0 entry from Cyprus, Monsieur Salut had decided in his headlong rush toward Queer Street to turn disappointment to virtue.
All the way from the Black Sea comes this sign of the globalisation of Sunderland support.
The picture comes from a Spurs supporter, George Dearsley, an acquaintance who cut his journalistic teeth on the Northern Echo.
Burnley away and another chance to Guess the Score will come soon enough. But first, let’s hear about a winner, a supporter whose mother moved south but had the good sense and exceptional style to go back to her native Sunderland to give birth to each of her children …
Bill Cowell is one of this site’s more regular visitors and, via the Comments, contributors. He has been watching Sunderland since, wait for it, the late 1940s. It is fitting that he should have won the first sponsored instalment of the Guess the Score feature.
Let’s go early, I thought. The international breaks are important of course, and it was naturally Sunderland AFC that turned Danny Welbeck into such an impressive striker.
But even though I have to return to France until October, I am excited as anyone planning to be at the SoL on Saturday about the resumption of proper football.
And I also have a great little partnership to announce.