Manchester United

Sixer’s Sevens: Manchester United 3 SAFC 0. Inadequate defending = no points

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Jake: catch Sixer's instant seven-word verdicts throughout the season
Jake: catch Sixer’s instant seven-word verdicts throughout the season at https://safc.blog/category/sixers-sevens/sixers-sevens-2015-2016/

Monsieur Salut writes: please once again accept apologies for the dismal look of Salut! Sunderland. Our web guru is doing what he can to restore the site to normal after yesterday’s complete breakdown and we are pretty much in his hands. Pete Sixsmith doesn’t worry himself too much with technical matters, except in assessing SAFC’s glaring technical deficiencies. He thought we did OK in the first half until a slick United move cut us open and gave them a HT lead. A second goal 40 seconds into the second half ended the match as a contest and the third was no surprise. Catts did OK but Jake’s caption spots the obvious missing link ..

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Sunderland’s Old Trafford glories: when Suggett, Mulhall and Seb buried Manchester United

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SALUT! Sunderland is very sorry that the site was unavailable yesterday and that it appears to be making only a gradual return towards normality. The servers said “emergency” maintenance was needed but are notoriously bad at keeping people informed. This posting was therefore wasted yesterday so here it is again …

Beating Manchester United on their own ground is not impossible, even for Sunderland.

Some, like a Netherlands-based reader Paul Devine, remember the last-but-one actual victory at Old Trafford very well.

“Against Best, Law, Bobby, Paddy and the rest, no one gave us an earthly … I was there, transported on a Roberts bus (apostrophe or no apostrophe) from Wingate to Stretford.”That was in this game’s Guess the Score competition and Paul went on to predict the same scoreline for Saturday.

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Manchester United ‘Who are You?’: Posnan, LVG and O’Shea’s exquisite nutmeg and chip

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Jordan Street
Jordan Street

Jordan Street* is just 23, a home-and-away Man United supporter who comes from the city and is as passionate about his club as it’s possible to be. See his blog Old Trafford Faithful or his tweets at http:///www.twitter.com/otfaithful. We’ve often been fortunate with the quality of our Man Utd Who are You?s and Jordan’s is no exception. He likes Sunderland for being northern, thinks we have a decent enough squad but fears Dick Advocaat is not the man to keep us out of trouble. We completely forgot to ask which of our players he wouldn’t mind seeing in United colours but he did try to make us feel better about 1-4 to Citeh by recalling a more humiliating scoreline of United’s own …

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Manchester United v SAFC Guess the Score: one for the cricket scoreboard?

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Jake: 'if they declare early, we might snatch something. Isn't that right, doctor?'
Jake: ‘if they declare early, we might snatch something. Isn’t that right, doctor?’

There is, of no course, no truth in the rumour that the venue of Sunderland’s visit to Man Utd on Saturday, while still at Old Trafford, is being moved half a mile to the much older cricket ground to reflect the likely scoring pattern.

Dick Advocaat’s finest could even shock us. But then anything short of an emphatic defeat would probably shock most of us.

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Diving for glory. Is blaming foreigners jingoistic piffle, or sadly spot-on?

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Tom Webb
Tom Webb

Salut! Sunderland has been banging on for years about diving, the feigning of injury, unprofessional attempts by players to get opponents booked or sent off and other forms of cheating. The issue is raised with every “Who are You?” interviewee and I can think of only one or two who said too much fuss was made of it.

But should we really accept that British players are largely blameless, or that they were until they caught the nasty habits of Johnny Foreigner?

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Taylor Made: a BBC football version of This is Your Life

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Bill Taylor gets lost in stats
Bill Taylor gets lost in stats

Bill Taylor came across a nifty new BBC tool allowing fans of all Premier League teams to calculate their clubs’ performance during their lifetimes. Fellow Sunderland supporters – and others – are invited to have a go and report back any interesting findings …

There’s no evidence to support this, but George Santayana, the Spanish/American writer and philosopher, COULD have been at Wembley in 1937 to see Sunderland clobber Preston North End 3-1 in the FA Cup. Santayana was certainly in Europe at the time.

And the saying he’s most famous for could well be applied to the Black Cats and their long-suffering fans: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

For those of us who have trouble remembering what happened last week, let alone a few decades ago, the BBC’s football website has unveiled a magical new tool to jog our memories.

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Revitalise the Premier: expand Chelsea, Manchester, Arsenal hierarchy, send bottom six down

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Jake: 'but will this work for us?'
Jake: ‘but will this work for us?’

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.

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Supporting Manchester United, Arsenal, Barcelona or Melchester Rovers: OK wherever you’re from

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Click me for a better view of the ingredients: geographical references to Jake, M Salut & Sixer, Malcolm Dawson and John McCormick
Click for a better view of the ingredients: geographical references to Jake, M Salut & Sixer, Malcolm Dawson and John McCormick
Malcolm Dawson, Salut! Sunderland‘s deputy editor, didn’t know quite what he was starting when he dredged up Monsieur Salut’s old guide to the criteria to be met before it became acceptable to support Sunderland, Manchester United or, for that matter, anyone else.

It’s here – https://safc.blog/2015/07/who-do-you-support-what-gives-you-the-right/#comments – with some great comments, new or posted when the piece originally appeared five years ago.

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