Sunderland

Soapbox: Gardner digs in – we told you he was good

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Recovering from the rigours of marching for public sector pension rights, Pete Sixsmith allows himself an “I told you so” moment on Craig Gardner, which just about makes up for the appalling headline pun he requested …

Another day, another new player, as the arrival of Connor Wickham was followed by Craig Gardner signing on the dotted line in a £4.5m deal from relegated and financially troubled Birmingham City. He’s 24, a former England U21 player (not that that means a great deal – most English-born players are nowadays) and he scored 10 goals for the Blues last season. It looks like a good signing.

He came on for Birmingham at half time in the opening game of last season and changed things very much for the better for them. I wrote at the time; “Gardner carried the ball effectively and allowed Larsson to push forward. He is an underrated player and looks a better bet than either Bowyer or Ferguson.”

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Gardner and Dong-Won transfers: more news to welcome

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Mrs Logic* likes new signings too


Salut! Sunderland continues to be impressed by Steve Bruce’s close season shopping exploits.

We’d love to reproduce the photo of Bruce with one of the latest new signings, Craig Gardner, showing our acquisition from Birmingham City looking suspiciously like Niall Quinn. But we’ d only have the heavies from the Football Data Co down our throats if we did so you will have to go to the offical club site for that.

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A Sunderland farewell to Stoke City’s Man of Letters

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From Stephen Foster's Guardian profile

No, we are not playing Stoke City this weekend. So Salut! Sunderland‘s questions and Stephen Foster‘s replies might seem out of time. They appear, however, as a tribute to a Stephen, a successful author who loved City with a passion that remained undiminished after life took him to London and then East Anglia. He died last week – read more here – robbing friends and family of a much-loved figure in their own lives, and Salut! Sunderland of a willing volunteer in future Who Are You? features; he had promised to participate each year – as long as we both stayed up. RIP Stephen …

Back in November last year, just after that mauling at St James’ Park, Sunderland had a must-win game coming up: lose to Stoke City after the 5-1 trouncing at Newcastle and alarm bells would not merely be sounding but exploding into a million fragments. And we were proud to have found Stephen Foster to handle the Who Are You? questionnaire ahead of the game at the Stadium of Light that we won 2-0 thanks to a pair of Gyan goals and some illegal but unspotted goal-line derring-do from Lee Cattermole. I’d told Stephen Stoke City was, for reasons I could not pinpoint, the toughest club from which to find willing candidates for the series. “I can’t understand your previous difficulties,” he told me, “most Stokies are proper gobs****s.”

See how his death has prompted a wonderful stream of condolences and tributes by visiting the Stoke fansite Oatcake, to which he occasionally contributed as “Winger”. This is how the Q&A with Salut! Sunderland ran, starting with the original introduction …

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Stephen Foster RIP: supporter of Stoke, friend of Salut! Sunderland

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Salut! Sunderland last heard from Stephen Foster, a richly talented man whose books on supporting Stoke City probably made him little or no money but stand as Hornby-standard classics of football writing, in January.

Two months earlier, Stephen had contributed an excellent set of answers to the Who are You? questionnaire for the Sunderland v Stoke City game. When I thanked him, he replied: “Make it an annual event, unless one of us goes down.”

Tragically, there won’t be an annual event. Stephen was found dead at the early age of 48, probably having drowned, at Trowse Meadow, Whitlingham Broad, not far from his Norwich home last Thursday. He had earlier been reported missing.

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Soapbox: gold to Ipswich, welcome to Wickham

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Does this amount to strikebreaking, a scabby edition of Soapbox? Pete Sixsmith is meant to be on strike. Truth is he couldn’t resist upping tools long enough to tell us he likes what he has seen so far in the close season transfer dealings …

Many years of my working life have been spent working with 18-year-olds. Some went on to be doctors and lawyers. One has produced a bestselling novel. Some went into the caring professions – nursing, social work, comforting Newcastle fans. And some hit the depths and became teachers. But I have never taught one with an £8m price tag around his neck or hers.

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Official: great coup as Wickham wanders to Sunderland not Liverpool

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Addick-tedKevin


Salut! Sunderland is delighted to be able to pass on OFFICIAL word that Ipswich’s England under-21 international Connor Wickham is now a Sunderland player.

Despite the reported interest of Liverpool – the club he is said to support – Steve Bruce and Niall Quinn have succeeded in persuading him that his immediate future lies at the Stadium of Light.

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Wickham’s ‘£13 million’, Salut! Sunderland’s one million

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WSC: sponsors of the Who are You? awards


Nothing official on Connor Wickham, but today’s developments and eyebrow-raising estimates of £!3m as the size of our bid suggest genuine manoeuvres even if the lad still fancies that Anfield bench (read the footnote*), so first let us deal with a smaller number of millions …

If you scroll far enough down the left-hand sidebar, past all the links to other items at Salut! Sunderland or its sister sites, you reach – as I start writing this article – the figure of 995,769. In fact, for reasons unknown to me, you also see 995,770 just above it.

In other words, we are within a few days of hitting the million mark.

Now I am sure there are loads – millions? – of websites that attract a million visitors a minute, if not a trillion hits a second. Even so, it seems a milestone worth crowing about a little.

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Could this be our week for some really big transfer news?

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This will be a short posting to interrupt Salut! Sunderland‘s cruise through the ocean of entertaining material to be found in the 17 editions that the lads at It’s The Hope I Can’t Stand managed to publish before going the way of the Daily Sketch, Daily Herald, Reynolds News, Sunday Correspondent and Today, not to mention the Darlington Evening Despatch.

I have no intention of breaking my own rule of staying aloof, except in special circumstances (eg Jordan Henderson), of transfer speculation affecting SAFC. I am as curious as any supporter about the latest names in the frame, or reported developments in this or that bid. But I also take every single story, wherever it appears in print, on radio and TV or online, with a big enough pinch of salt to have government health busybodies carting me off for treatment.

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The Ithics Files: (6) Craig Russell gets four, Reid wanted five

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Click for larger view


Goal machine may be putting it high. But Craig Russell’s return on 149 games for Sunderland was 31, not prolific – Darren Bent scored one more in 58 – but certainly respectable. And he played with full heart for the club he loved, just as he now works for it as masseur.

In the latest of our reproductions of classic articles from the fanzine It’s The Hope I Can’t Stand, an anonymous writer with an eccentric approach to possessive punctuation – you weren’t once an Ithics hack were you, Pete Sixsmith? – bids a fond farewell to the local lad who scored goals but couldn’t quite convince Peter Reid of his value.

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The Ithics Files: (5) noise, belligerence and Bovril at the SoL

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Nic Wiseman has worked like a Trojan to help get this series under way, choosing and scanning and sending cracking extracts from It’s The Hope I Can’t Stand, the SAFC fanzine he co-edited in the last 1990s.

Here’s one Nic wrote himself, an entertaining tour of the matchday experience of different areas of the Stadium of Light. So that makes it timeless, too; many, especially those of us swimming in the East Stand Bovril, will relate to his guide years later.

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