Our Southend “Who are You?” interviewee Ian Charnock has expressed the hope that Jack Ross adopts a cautious approach and holds back on selecting key players.
But isn’t it important to end the disappointing league programme on a high? A team that has won only one of the last six games is arguably not in the best frame of mind going into the playoffs.
Monsieur Salut writes: this was to have been our promotion party, the last game of the season with a return to the Championship already sealed or to play for. Well, we know what happened to that pipedream. Sunderland can improve their playoff position by winning, and gain a modest boost to morale in the process, but that is all.
For our last Who are You? interviewee for a league game, Ian Charnock*, it’s a question of survival. It is tight at the bottom with Bradford City already relegated but Ian’s team, Southend, one of five desperately trying to avoid the other three places.
We found Ian via the football site Over the Bar, for which he has written, and thank them for putting us in touch with him …. his excellent interview could be a late candidate for one of our HAWAYs (Highly Articulate Who are You? awards)
Pete Sixsmith made the short trip across the Pennines, writes John McCormick, with cuddly Joey Barton urging his Fleetwood men to send us home in tears.
For the miracle to happen, Sunderland needed a hatful of goals, let alone what had to befall our promotion rivals. Lee Cattermole scored to give us a halftime lead and Barnes and Benno were in no doubt we should have been much further ahead.
Sixer judged it to be a competent first 45; afterwards, B&B felt we allowed Fleetwood to claw a way back into the game. ‘Losing our grip,’ said Benno on 70 and four minutes later, Madden equalised for Fleetwood and that alone would have consigned us to the playoffs. The inability to hold or build on a lead had reared its head yet again and draw number 20 loomed. It didn’t come. A flurry of Sunderland activity brought late excitement but when the winner arrived, it went to Fleetwood …
Take your pick from Sixer’s seven-word verdicts below. His fuller analysis would have been brutal. Should we expect a more measured assessment given that our deputy editor Malcolm Dawson – also present – is writing it? We’ll see …
Monsieur Salut writes: he calls himself Matty at Twitter but I will not embed the tweet, purporting to show a full name, because a) it may not be his for all I know and b) I have no wish to spread his word, other than to challenge it …
Monsieur Salut writes: John McKenna*, our interviewee for the penultimate league game of the season (and if only it could be our season’s penultimate game of any kind), comes to us via Pete Sixsmith and the interest they share in groundhopping.
John proves to be a master of restraint and balance when asked about a certain Joey Barton – he says elsewhere he is acquainted with the laws of libel and nothing in his reply would be of interest to Messrs Sue, Grabbitt and Runne – and provides an informative guide to the recent history of his club, pointing out that it plays in a town with a smaller population than the crowd that turned up at the Stadium of Light for the first game between us …
It’s over bar the playoffs. Another failure to win ends any real prospect of an automatic promotion place.
Drawing at home to Portsmouth didn’t cause this huge disappointment. We had already shot ourselves in one foot, losing that crazy 5-4 game at home to Coventry, and then in the other one after going ahead late at Peterborough, says Monsieur Salut. Not to mention what someone called a billion other draws.
Each time we stumbled, others just got on with doing their jobs.
A glance at the other results has tended to confirm our fears: no one else has been slipping up as often at this crucial stage of the season.
Let Pete Sixsmith add his appreciation of our superb midfielder after what has been for him, come what may, an outstanding season …and he is picking up awards, starting with one from the SAFCSA branch liaison council (Luke O’Nien was the young player of the season)
Monsieur Salut writes: Peter Allen is my very good pal and partner-in-crime (if that’s the right way to describe our shared trade of journalism) in Paris. He happens to support Portsmouth and, having made it to Wembley, hoped to visit Sunderland for this Saturday’s game. Instead, he will be stuck in France, scouring the internet for an audio or visual link.
His real Who are You? was the one he did back in December but which became a casualty when this site crashed on the day we played them at Fratton Park. I refreshed it earlier this week and it remains, despite being out of date in terms of the League One promotion race, a great read. See it at this link.
And now, at much shorter length, is how he sees things as the season nears a climax …
Even as I wrote last week that we would remain masters of our destiny and go up automatically provided we matched our rivals’ results, I was riddled with doubt, says Monsieur Salut.
A quick look at the fixtures at the top end of League One table showed there was no room for the least slip. Even when I saw that Coventry were ahead at Portsmouth, it seemed too much to hope that this would remain the case (if the spirit of Jimmy Hill has any influence, his old club’s two games involving us and Pompey could not have gone better).
As for Barnsley and Luton, did anyone seriously expect other than comfortable wins at Plymouth and Accrington Stanley.
THIS interview, from just before our 3-1 defeat at Fratton Park in December, was among many items lost when the Salut! Sunderland site crashed. It took an expensive repair job to get back to normal but not everything was salvaged. John McCormick edited and posted the original article so what appears below – restored now more than anything because Peter Allen put a lot of thoughts into his responses and it remains a good read despite the passage of time – has been cobbled together from the e-mail exchange of questions and answers and the headline will differ from John’s.
Monsieur Salut writes: Peter Allen* was my favourite confrere among the British continent of foreign correspondents when I lived in Paris. We worked, ate and drank together, often enough finding a televised match to watch. We were even tear-gassed together, covering a student riot outside the Sorbonne. Pete is still in Paris but is a lifelong Pompey supporter. He’s seen good days and miserable days for his club. [Back in December] he thought the League One championship would be decided when our teams met near the end of the season. [That has all changed but here is how he looked forward to that first game between us this season, when Wembley for Checkatrade and maybe even the playoffs were far from our thoughts] …
