Pete Sixsmith eulogises a thumpingly good display by Sunderland, heaping praise on supreme gifts and honest endeavour alike. He will return to the matter of the disappointingly low attendance but, for now, revels in the warm glow of resurgent times for the club …
Early doors, they set their stall out and just about nicked it. The wantaway stopper between the sticks was different …
So we end the pre-season build undefeated in Scotland and the North East, winless in Germany and Lancashire.
Without the slightest disrespect to York City, Kilmarnock, Hartlepool and Darlington, the four teams we have beaten in the friendlies, it is fair to assume Liverpool will present a somewhat tougher obstacle in the opening Premier League game at Anfield next Saturday.
Not the toughest of pre-season opposition but good to record a win all the same. And 399 SAFC supporters were counted among the 2,333 crowd.
Thanks to the combined efforts of the safc.com live text team, and Mr Peter Sixsmith of this parish, I knew fairly quickly that we had taken the lead at Kilmarnock and soon after the end that we had beaten them 2-1.
Sunday’s a day of rest, especially after you’ve won for the first time since Jan 22. Pete Sixsmith‘s analysis will appear tomorrow. Please feel free to add your own quotes to these …
Steve Bruce:
“I have to say a big thank you to the supporters. They were magnificent and played their part from the first whistle to the last.”
Forgiven: a Bordeaux fan M Salut hammers at badminton
Those of you with hair have torn it out, the milk is well and truly spilt or even spilled Over at non-football Salut!, I wondered aloud whether watching Sunderland could, like smoking, seriously damage your health. It has been a week in which a supporter of West Brom, of all clubs, cockily dismissed Sunderland in his “fan’s view” for the Daily Mail as “physical, determined but limited”. And that was just the first-half, when we were ahead. So let’s change tack. Here, before we start fretting about Birmingham away, is another episode in our French Fancies series …
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Yes. I really should get out more. The time to end the ridiculous feud with Les Girondins de Bordeaux has surely past. Who cares if the club president Jean-Louis Triaud and his then manager, Laurent Blanc, insulted Sunderland AFC?
But every time I feel Salut! Sunderland should move on, bury the hatchet, find someone else to taunt, along comes an excuse to reopen hostilities with the self-important Ligue 1 underachievers who declared that Sunderland AFC were altogether too small a club to be allowed to buy Marouane Chamakh (now at Arsenal, where he scores a little and dives a lot).
Steve Bruce has talked up the performances of Asamoah Gyan and, in particular, his adaptability to the role of solitary striker.
He makes it sound almost like something we’d planned all along.
Give us the French lower leagues, cried Pete Sixsmith, or something like that.
I do not intend to make a habit of it but here, bang up to date, is the state of the French Ligue 2, of special interest to our new recruit Stéphane Sessegnon.
This is Stephane Sessegnon – the goals and the dribbles in the most-viewed YouTube clip of him.
He’s ours.
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