Monsieur Salut asked Pete Sixsmith for a slice of nostalgia and it doesn’t come much better than this, a lovely …
The beautiful game, with all those blemishes the heaviest make-up cannot conceal, is back. There may still be a Test series going on, and loads of people are on holiday or have holidays still to take, but football won’t wait.
And that means, at Salut! Sunderland, the return of Guess the Score. Let’s have a bumper entry for the opening game versus Leicester City at the King Power Stadium.
Malcolm Dawson writes….this was Dick’s last chance pre-season to give what will probably be his first choice eleven a run …
Ordinary Jon, aka Jon Adamson, Sunderland supporter and football blogger******, was bored rigid by the vaunted Premier League last season. Even our customary great escape left him feeling there’d been only two or three SAFC games worth remembering and that ours wasn’t even the great escape anyway. His recipe for making life at the top more exciting, and life at the bottom more troublesome, follows. It will suit some appetites, it may cause acute indigestion and it could be too tongue-in-cheek to win votes on Come Dine With Me. Bland fare it is not …
The dullest season since the Premier League began suggests radical action is required. Here’s a five point plan to bring some excitement back into the beautiful product.
Strange, isn’t it? I spend Monday evening idly browsing the MLS (aka Major League Soccer) website trying to work out how it (the league, not the website) operates and then along comes David Millward with a piece about a football convention in the USA. I wonder if the fans he mixed with can get their heads around relegation and promotion better than I can handle the subtleties of the MLS.
Casual visitors to this site might might not be aware that at the start of last season I made a prediction about who would suffer relegation from the Premiership and then tracked those clubs (and SAFC, of course) over the season. At the end of my final post of the series I set up a poll to see who readers thought would be relegated at the end of the coming season.
With almost four hundred votes cast you might think the results bear scrutiny. But think again. The average PL attendance is 36,000. MOTD can attract over 4 million. More than 26 million viewers watched FA Cup action on TV during last January. So a few hundred’s really small beer, especially as each reader can have three votes.
At the start of last season I chose three relegation candidates (QPR, Hull and Aston Villa) and two reserves (Southampton and West Brom) on the basis of PL history and some iffy statistics.
As you might expect, I got some stick from fans who didn’t like my forecast:
Mr QPR said “What a rubbish article, how can a Sunderland fan have any view on relegation when they will be one of the teams themselves”
Germany Tiger said Hull had improved significantly as well as: “You are the only one (and I’ve read a lot) who have Hull in a relegation spot, which suggests to me that there is still a bit of disappointment at being put to the sword 3 times last season by the Tigers and I predict a few more this season also….. oh if we could only play Sunderland every week… deep joy!!”
Bald ugly bloke was a bit more restrained, and perhaps a bit more optimistic: “Laughable that you have Hull City in the 3! The Tigers will be pushing top half.”
Having been around for a few seasons, Swallavc was much more measured: “Aston Villa have been relegated in 0% of premier league seasons and therefore will be safe!”
I could go on, but what I’d prefer to say is that many of the readers, SAFC fans and others, were prepared to give their opinions on relegation candidates, as well as of my words . I’ll come back to this at the end.
John McCormick writes: while we don’t know what the future will bring, although we know it won’t be orange, we do know what the past was like. It was like the season before, and the season before that. You know what I mean, a typical Sunderland season in which we beat the Mags, had a brush with relegation, changed managers, stayed up, hey hum…
That’s the bare bones of it.
And to put flesh on those bones, here is Pete Sixsmith with his conclusion to our “End of Season Reviews”
Malcolm Dawson writes….we have had several “must win” games at the Stadium of Light this season and generally (Burnley and …
Malcolm Dawson writes….well I didn’t squirm in my seat as much as I thought I might have done. It wasn’t …