Salut! Sunderland is delighted to extend a warm welcome to Paddy McNair and Donald Love, our latest new recruits, whose much-touted transfers were finally announced by SAFC today.
None of the usual “undisclosed fee” nonsense; the club itself is happy to state the price – £5.5m to Manchester United for the pair, and you can bet your bottom dollar, pound or euro that the cost of the more experienced McNair took up the lion’s share of that total.
For our first Who are You? interview of the season, we turned to a Manchester City fanatic, Makahil ‘Mak’ Nuur, creator of the MCFC 1894 Twitter pages and, coming soon, podcast. His responses to our questions include a welcome prediction that David Moyes will do well for us – and a plea to Niall Quinn to be less mean to City on the telly …
Another opening day looms and, by the skin of our teeth, Sunderland kick off a 10th successive season in the Premier League.
The new manager’s post-match e-mails will be given the title of Moyes on the Boys, a clear winner in the recent poll and suggested by a reader signing himself as JEL.
Will it be the Boys minus King Kone? As I write, it is looking grim but inconclusive. I tweeted that SAFC supporters had a right to expect our new manager to be fighting tooth and nail to keep him but if this Northern Echo report is to be believed, that may not be the case.
If we do lose perhaps the best centre back seen in Sunderland colours since Dave Watson, it will be a huge setback and the so far elusive inward business had better be good (though we must hope Moyes has found a gem in Papy Djilobodji).
Malcolm Dawson writes….each year is the same or at least it seems to be. We end one season and I …
This season’s relegation poll went live at about 8.30 on Wednesday morning. By 2.30 some eighteen hundred votes had been cast. Hull received about a third of them and remained clear favourites. Burnley stayed in second place, although the gap had widened, and we had moved up to third. The other five clubs were well behind:
Certain events mark the progress of the year. For instance you know it’s August Bank holiday when Selfridges show off …
Malcolm Dawson writes….I turned on my new internet enabled telly last night to watch the Lads play the final warm …
It was June 12th when I first put up this season’s relegation poll and July 1st, when the transfer window opened, that I gave you the preliminary results.
Every Premiership club received some votes. Man Utd got thirteen. Spurs and Arsenal (last relegated in the year the Royal Flying Corps established its first airfield) both got ten. Man City, Liverpool and Chelsea received six each, as did Stoke. West Ham were the second best fancied team, with four votes, while Everton received only two votes and are thus deemed most likely to stay in the top division (something they have managed every year since the end of rationing) but not entirely safe.
Given such wishful thinking I had to do some winnowing so I chose 100 votes as the cut-off, which gave me a reasonable number of 8 clubs to watch, and you can see the results in the title above.
Malcolm Dawson writes….aficionados of Vic Reeves Big Night Out in the early 90s will doubtless recall the Living Carpets. Basically …
Malcolm Dawson writes………I gave some serious thought to going down to France for the pre-season friendlies but in the end …