Roker Park

The day they knew Brian Clough’s career was doomed

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Our magnificent man in his flying machine is Bill Taylor, who lives in Canada these days but is a Sunderland-daft Bishop lad. He has never lost the passion despite living thousands of miles from County Durham and even becoming a naturalised Canadian. Older fans will identify with his nostalgic memories of an early introduction to Roker Park; younger ones will get an idea of what it was like. You’ll guess from the ending that it was written before Saturday’s game when Cattermole not only remained uninjured and unpunished but had a blinder …

I first heard the Roker Roar from a distance, a backyard a couple of streets away from the Fulwell End. I can’t have been any more than five at the time.

“What’s that?” I asked. And my dad replied: “Sounds like the Lads just put one in.”

The Lads?

“Sunderland,” he said, a bit testily as if I should’ve known without asking. “The team. OUR team.”

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1966 and all that: World Cup memories (1)

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Pete Sixsmith packs his authoritative knowledge of football with a great recall of detail of the sort that used to earn old Leslie Welch a decent living as the Memory Man. Let’s start Pete’s series of recollections from the past 11 World Cups in the obvious place …

This is the first tournament that I can really remember. 1958 in Sweden didn’t have much impact on a seven-year-old wrapped up in the world of Lewis Jones and Jeff Stephenson at Leeds RLFC, while 1962 in Chile was a long way away and the TV pictures had to be flown over to appear a day late.

I have vague memories of the Battle of Santiago ( Italy and Chile kicked lumps out of each other, while the English referee Ken Aston looked on in amazement) and I do remember the stanchions on the goalposts in Santiago being curved rather than straight. And I wanted Czechoslovakia to win as I was a fledgling Communist.

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Another evil of corporate football, or just a fuss about a name?

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Are the suits intent on chipping away at the soul of football until nothing’s left, as I suggested elsewhere in response to SAFC’s new Big Idea, hawking the name of the Stadium of Light? Or does it not matter a jot what the place is called as long as we are given something to appreciate once inside? Colin Randall thought he was sure of the answer …

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So there I was, driving through France and feeling happy with life. I’ve just about persuaded myself (perhaps prematurely) that we’re not going down. I love France and shouted as much when I saw the first road sign – Aix-en-Provence/Toulon/Nice – that told me I was on the last leg (Toulon being little more than a Jonny Wilkinson drop kick from where I live).

Then came a succession of noises from the mobile, enough to give me the idea there might be a hot new debate on the Blackcats e-mail loop.

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Soapbox: how can a week without football be interesting?

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Depriving Pete Sixsmith of a football game on a Saturday – in truth, on any day at all – is a bit like putting a junkie on cold turkey. The withdrawal symptons include harking back nearly half a century to the year when it was really was cold, and some matches were postponed dozens of times before they could be played …


The “Big Freeze” really hit us badly last week. Try as I did, it just wasn’t possible to get to work on Wednesday and Thursday, and by Friday most of the kids had decided to take the whole week off so we only had about 40 per cent of the little darlings in.

It came as no surprise when the rather Orwellian “Safety Committee” decided that the Stadium of Light surrounds were too dangerous for Sunderland v Bolton to go ahead. I suspect they were also looking at the forecast, which was poor and wondering how on earth people would get tot the stadium and then get home in what was predicted to be a white out.

So, for the first time since the rainstorm at New Mills last March, I was unable to watch a football match on a Saturday afternoon in the season. And it was boring, boring,boring.

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Melanie Hill: flirting on the Fulwell

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When I thank you for the stream of visits to Salut! Sunderland that has sent us rocketing up the Soccerlinks hit parade to the dizzy heights of the mid-40s, “you” includes the away fans attracted by the Who Are You? feature and such controversies as the Ilunga/Jones affair. While I stand by for an invasion by Spurs fans later in the week, ahead of Saturday’s game at White Hart Lane, I will give another airing to an interview from the Celebrity Supporters series that began with 5573 (later renamed Wear Down South), the magazine of the Sunderland supporters’ association London branch, and continued at the old site.

Melanie Hill, whom I described as a “smashing actress known from Bread, Brassed Off and much more” was easily one of the nicest interviewees in the series. She agreed to an interview two days before the fateful Arsenal match in Oct 2002, Peter Reid’s last in charge, and rang again just before kick-off to fix a time. The interview took place the day after Reid’s sacking. As I said at the time, it felt like a whirlwind telephone romance.

Here, for those who missed the interview when it first appeared (and apologies to those for whom it is just a repeat), is one of the stars of our wider support base …

This starts as a tale of two celebrities with strong Sunderland links, of one door opening while the echo of another slamming shut is ringing in the ears.

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October 1968: hammered, but the injustice still Hurst

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Colin Randallremembers highs and lows from 40+ years of games between Sunderland and West Ham …

On the face of it, this does not look the worst line-up the English top flight has seen:

Montgomery; Irwin, Hurley, Palmer, Harvey; Suggett, Porterfield, Herd; Harris, Brand, Hughes

Nor, necessarily, does this have the appearance of a world-beating XI:

Ferguson; Bonds, Stephenson, Moore, Charles; Redknapp, Boyce, Peter; Brooking, Hurst, Sissons

King Charlie & co clearly had an offday.

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Soapbox: second city Blues

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As Pete Sixsmith packs his knapsack for Sunderland’s visit to St Andrew’s, he reflects on past encounters between our clubs – and a rare old night in Durham after one of them …

Maybe we should have some affinity with Birmingham City. Like us, they are widely perceived as the second club out of three, living in the shadows of Aston Villa, but bigger than West Bromwich Albion.

That’s like us with the Mags and the Boro. We know that we are a better, smarter and altogether nicer club than our neighbours up the A184, while we have always looked down on those who dwell in the smog encrusted town down south on the A19.

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Sunderland music: from cops and pop to the classics

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Anything to fill in time on a football-free Saturday (meaningful football, that is). Colin Randall recalls a few of the musical pieces familiar to fans of Sunderland going back to the 1960s …

Samantha Marie Sprackling is the real name, Saffron the one she’s better known by. It probably won’t offend her to know Salut! Sunderland finds her pleasing on the eye and the ear.

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Calling all Sunderland fans who never knew Roker Park

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The headline narrows it down a little. But Salut! Sunderland today launches a modest competition*, and only supporters for whom the Stadium of Light has always been our home ground can enter. You may be too young to have visited Roker Park. You may, for whatever reason, have started attending games only after the move to the Stadium of Light. Write about the SoL, what you like about it, what it means to you, the best and worst times you’ve had there, anything you dislike about it. Salut! Sunderland will publish the best entries AND award a first prize to the value to £100 (there may be runners-up awards depending on entries. Send them to colinrandall@hotmail.com … we’re looking for passion and imagination rather than a budding Hemingway or Hornby, but don’t be put off if you have genuine writing talent.

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Let’s kick it off with the reminiscences of another old codger from the days before Roker Park was a private housing estate with silly street names evoking the grand old stadium. Jeremy Robsons piece explained why, for a Murton lad exiled in deepest Canada, Roker means so much to him that he cannot even bring himself on trips home to go near what has become of the place. It originally appeared a few months ago but will be new to many of our readers ….

It’s almost 12 years since we left Roker Park.

To this day I’ve never returned to the old site. I remember standing gazing around the wonderful old stadium for as long as the stewards would let us after the Everton game, in a feeble attempt to take in the magnitude of those last few moments in the place where we’d all spent so much of our lives, and where history was written, where reputations were won and lost, but most of all a place where millions of memories were generated amongst countless thousands of us. All different, all shared and yet all unique.

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