End of season reviews 2016-17 (1): ‘hire and fire’ is the Lars word

Lars Knutsen touching base

STOP PRESS – Lars submitted this piece well before the season end, before the Arsenal game in fact. It has been sitting in the draft folder for a week and would you know it – within minutes of it going live Moyes resigns. MD

Malcolm Dawson, deputy editor, writes: at the end of a season that will linger long in the memory as one we would wish to forget, Salut! Sunderland approached both its regular and occasional contributors for their thoughts. Don’t be fooled by the name – Lars Knutsen is Mackem through and through and even though his work took him away from his Boldon roots to Cambridge via Scandinavia and the USA. he retains his love of SAFC. Working as he did in the pharmaceutical sector  you’d think he might have driven his troops into researching a cure for the compulsion to follow a club that has been a long term underachiever but no – like the rest of us he is stuck with his lot.

You can read more of Lars’s contributions here

Monsieur Salut adds: a series of painful steroid injections to a dodgy knee reminded me today it was time to launch this series of end-of-season reviews. With thanks to Malcolm for preparing Lars’s contribution for publication, let me make it clear the series is open to all Salut! Sunderland readers who have time and inclination to offer their own reviews of a season. Just let us know – leave a message below or use the contact link you’ll find somewhere on the home page

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Premier title looks sorted but Sunderland can now affect Hull and Swansea’s fate

… through the Championship, we’re on our way

After a season devoid of impact or excitement, Sunderland are in the relatively unusual position of having a major say in who else goes down – and a glance at the odds at 10bet homepage suggests the bookies don’t expect us to stand in Swansea’s way on Saturday.

Our rare win at the weekend, with goals from Billy Jones and Jermain Defoe to beat Hull, did the Swans a power of good. But they were also doing what we used to do when we took survival battles more seriously: they won an important game of their own.

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Hull City ‘Who are You?’: soft spot, heavy heart for Sunderland

Cheering from afar: Ian Wilson and a young Tiger

Ian Wilson* is the warm-hearted Hull City fan who recently chipped in with £50 for the Bradley Lowery fund. He turns out to be exiled in Sri Lanka and to have spent a lot of time at Roker Park while working in the North East. Ian expresses obviously sincere sympathy on our relegation, muses over  the players he’d take from our squad, offers cautious optimism on Hull’s survival prospects – and says David Moyes is not the man to revive Sunderland’s fortunes …

Jake: ‘like a bat out of Hull?’

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Moyes on the boys v Bournemouth: “…nobody is going to talk about the performance*”

Moyes on the boys

John McCormick writes: To read the above in our manager’s post-match missive* you might think we went down 5-6 to Bayern Munich or Real Madrid after storming their barricades for 90 minutes.

The truth is somewhat different as we once again failed to score or keep a clean sheet against mediocre opposition.

At least he gets it right about the fans:

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Sunderland’s demise: blame Moyes, blame Short, blame life

M Salut: ‘can I use this baguette to batter anyone planning to vote Le Pen?’

Forgive Monsieur Salut for feeling down. How can a Sunderland supporter be otherwise?

The poor response, in terms of readers, to yesterday’s pre-match package, a very good ‘Who are You?’ and another prize Guess the Score, suggested lots of us have simply lost interest.

We remain fans of the only club we’ve properly supported but we feel cheated at the same time. The club has let us down in a big way. We may well fear, as did our Boro interviewee, for life in the Championship. But here, for what it is worth, is my preview of the Tees-Wear derby for ESPNFC, cleverly headlined ‘Last Rites for Sunderland as relegation looms into view’ …

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West Brom, Watford safe. Palace, Bournemouth, Burnley relaxing, ‘Boro, Hull, Swansea sweating. Sunderland propping them up.

John McCormick: We're not bottom, so is it a Happy Christmas?
John McCormick

Another empty weekend unless you’re a groundhopper like Sixer or a local league fan like Malcolm, which means it’s time for a relegation review. With six games to go in a compressed framework and a holiday coming up this is probably the last one I’ll be able to fit in.

It has been a long and tedious season (as have been the last four apart from that trip to Wembley,  only three years ago although  it seems like a lifetime, those six wins in a row, a sequence of wins against Citeh and wins at places like Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge *[see below]) and while some of our chosen teams have reached safety we haven’t and are still awaiting a conclusion.

And according to my calculations, as if you needed them, that conclusion isn’t good for us.

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