Steve Bruce

Dear Steve Bruce: this is how it feels …

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Bob Stokoe's handMrs Logic seeks a helping hand


Apologies to supporters in Crook, Norway and elsewhere who had to wait to see their comments appear – M Salut was away all day yesterday – and also to those who cannot bear to read another word about Sunderland 0 Fulham 3. Sorry, but there’s an awful lot to say. Salut! Sunderland readers include Steve Bruce champions, even in these straitened times but Mick Goulding is not among them, His depressing but incisive and heartfelt thoughts were first expressed at the Blackcats list, but could serve to perfection – with a couple of change, making Bruce read “you” – as a response to the manager’s post-match e-mail …

Dear Steve,

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Steve Bruce: awful … ‘but nothing we can do’

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Steve Bruce’s customary post-match e-mail should, for some beleaguered supporters who have already expressed their thoughts, have included the words “I resign”. Such a gesture would, of course, do us no good of any kind with just three games to play this season. But while Bruce has had to grapple with appalling injury problems, this was a dire display …

Dear Colin,

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Steve Bruce: no time for tantrums

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Thanks to Bernard Platt, Wigan Athletic AFC & This Northern Soul


We’ll take a long time getting round to it, but the question is simple enough: what possible interest was served by Steve Bruce refusing, if the reports are correct, to attend the post-match press conference? …

Salut! Sunderland supports Sunderland AFC with absolute passion. It was created by a journalist who started his career in the North East and later moved to Fleet Street (though he has also spent thousands of pounds and devoted countless hours to following the club since boyhood).

None of that will ever stop this site criticising SAFC when criticism seems merited, or criticising the press when that is merited, too.

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A win at last: the Wigan game in quotes

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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.”

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Wigan ‘Who are You?’: eating pies, fighting relegation, hailing Three Amigos

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We’re going early with this week’s “Who are You?”. It would be easy to say this was because it is such an important match that it was high time to stop carping about what has made it so. The more humdrum reason: I’m away in Italy today and will have my work cut out on Thursday. My thanks to Kieran Heapy, otherwise known as HeapyLatic on Wigan Athletic sites – including his own, Pie Eaters Footie* and the one through which we found him, This Northern Soul – for saving poor old Salut! Sunderland award-winning Bernard Ramsdale from having to do it again for the umpteenth time …

Salut! Sunderland: I hoped the tone of this question would have needed changing after last weekend, but not so. Can there be any Premier team you’d rather have to play than us just now?

It would be Blackpool, even though we have just played them, they are the team that are currently on the slide. They look very much like Burnley did last season, started well but second half of the season they have been found out and teams can stop them playing. Saying that you still have to be on top of the game, there really haven’t been any easy games this season, and any win has to be very well fought for.

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Birmingham Soapbox: better but still not good enough

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Steve Bruce took a lot more consolation from a 2-0 defeat at St Andrew’s than our own Pete Sixsmith, who – when not noting with grudging admiration the class of Seb Larsson – recognised some improvement but felt it stopped a long way short of what was required …

As recent performances go, this one wasn’t bad – although that really is damning it with faint praise. But it was another defeat, another drop in the table and an entry ticket to the scrap that is taking place to avoid visits to Coventry, Barnsley and Middlesbrough next season.

There are some positives that we can take from this. The passing was sharper and crisper than of late. We did create some chances. The team seemed to be together. On another day, we could have won or at least taken a much needed point.

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Darren Bent, the curse of the ‘calculated gamble’ and a Stoke ps

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Missing your goals

At some stage this week, we need to stop banging on about how to apportion blame for an atrocious run that has taken Sunderland from the fringes of European competition to the bleak familiarity of a relegation scrap.

We need to get behind the team, whatever some may think about its leadership, and provide encouragement for the home game (nearly said vital but they all are, potentially, now) against Wigan Athletic.

As seems to be our lot, we will face newly emboldened opponents. The 3-1 win at Blackpool has Latics fans simpering at the prospect of survival, not least when they see our state of disarray. It also shows, ominously, that they can score goals.

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