Ten games in: Man City, Arsenal visited but Man Utd and Chelsea to come

John McCormick: working on the data

Now this is not John McCormick at his most upbeat – not, at any rate, at the start of his review of the season so far. He’s been comparing and contrasting statistics again and what he comes up with would scare the living daylights out of most Sunderland supporters – if he hadn’t also identified a great SAFC tradition of making a nonsense, one way or the other, of the early season numbers …

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Barred from losing a SAFC-Newcastle derby? Ask the Bard

William ShakespeareImage: tonynetone (who had to doorstep William – or is it John McCormick? – for days to get this shot)

Out of the Henrys who have ruled England, Henry II would have been of more interest to Stéphane Sessegnon, assuming our Sess shares Lorik Cana’s hunger for cultural and historical knowledge – Henry was born in Le Mans, Sess played there. But for John McCormick‘s lurch into English Lit territory as his prelude to the Wear-Tyne derby, Henry V’s your man. Here’s hoping for no Shakespearean tragedy cometh Sunday …

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McCormick’s Craic: forward with football’s past

John McCormick - another journey into the past

John McCormick takes another entertaining look at football history, relatively recent on this occasion as he compares the evidence of reruns of games from the early 1980s with what we see these days. The headline seemed right but is adapted from an old Battlefield Band album title and slogan (Forward to Scotland’s Past), also dating from the 80s …

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Salut’s Week: Hillsborough reflections, the McClean tweet and preparing for Liverpool

Jake captures the theme

Much space at Salut! Sunderland has been devoted this week to articles that I am proud to have published on this site but wish had never been written. Naturally, I refer to the impassioned, decent and – yes – angry pieces written by individual Sunderland supporters with voices worth hearing on the Hillsborough disaster and this week’s shamefully late official exoneration of the Liverpool fans who were cynically blamed for its occurrence.

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Hillsborough and a Sunderland view from Liverpool: no ‘sense of jubilation’

The memorial garden at Sudley House; Liverpool

John McCormick, the third Sunderland supporter to collect his thoughts and write on these pages about the agonisingly late recognition of Hillsborough truths, has a special reason to care enough to say what he thinks. Liverpool his adopted city, his children’s birthplace and the place from which friends and colleagues set off that day in 1989 to watch a game of football in Sheffield …

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McCormick’s Craic: more on lies and statistics – and Everton’s wisely spent £40,000

Jake: willed on by an army travelling free?

John McCormick again raises Salut! Sunderland to levels of erudition George Dixon and Monsier Salut’s other hapless teachers would have thought impossible. But it all boils down to Everton romping past us in the FA cup replay thanks not to one of those Leon Osman ‘fall over own feet and wait for Howard Webb to see the invisible foul’ routines but to crafty subsidisation of away support. Unless, of course, they were just miles better than us …

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