I realise our massive fan base will be more than anxious to check out the latest Salut! Predictions League table, …
One big festival. Two big games. Two big chances to win Guess the Score.
The first bit is easy. Salut! Sunderland‘s tireless team of writers and illustrators – all, or nearly all, fellow supporters of that great thing that is SAFC – offers all readers, from near and far, a wonderful Christmas.
The return of a fixture popular among exiled Sunderland fans in the deep south, Southampton away; I recall seeing lots of our supporters on the Isle of Wight ferry when heading for a short break after one match. Eugene McManus, a Southampton fan since boyhood, is the gaffer at The Saints**, a pub named after the team more than half a century ago and welcoming to “housetrained” away followers (though it’s in Millbrook, about five miles from St Mary’s stadium) …
I think it goes without saying that we all just KNEW that Q.P.R would have an appointment sorted in time …
Last month, the Sports Mail – one of only four Saturday evening football papers still in operation in Britain – bit the dust. That leaves The Pink in Southampton, the Green ‘Un in Sheffield and the Football Echo in Sunderland. Must we accept even their days are numbered? There’s a response to that question from the Echo management …
In June last year, Salut! Sunderland put out a little appeal for knowledgeable supporters of QPR, Norwich City and Swansea to offer their services as interviewees in our Who are You? series.
Pete Sixsmith‘s bulky but now gym-honed frame has graced just about every ground known to football. Here’s his response to a highly personal survey naming the Stadium of Light as the best you’ll find …
The only certainty among the four clubs mentioned above is Reading, promoted thanks to the 1-0 win over Forest. Southampton look set to join them but may still have a little work to do while Wigan’s sensational recent wins have not yet ensured survival. Pete Sixsmith looks at the likely comings and goings and shamelessly allows his preferences to be dictated by geography, politics and beer …
Another of those retrospective looks, for the reader in a hurry, at what has been served up in recent days …
Breaks for internationals act a little like “slow down” signals for Salut! Sunderland.
Occasional contributors do not think of tossing anything our way. M Salut was away in Rome in any case, for a long weekend devoid of football unless you count a look round the Colisseum, a model – in terms of the building rather than original purpose – for the stadiums of today.
And for once, not even Pete Sixsmith could be trusted to return from some non-league backwater with flashes of entertaining prose. It remains to be seen whether he chooses to write about his own trip, a few days in Antwerp.
Both Pete Sixsmith and I have revelled in nostalgia for the Saturdays that were incomplete without a) football (honest, we saw football on Saturdays) and b) the “Pink” on the way home.
For home games, that meant getting off the train in Durham and having time before the connection to Bishop Auckland to drop down into town, have coffee and a pie and buy the football paper. We hoped the Echo would come before we had to climb back up the hill; sometimes we had to make do with the Newcastle Evening Chronicle version though on a good day we could get both.