Sixer’s Sevens: a lack of Power costs points against Walsall

I was intending to avoid puns about turning the power off but I thought of one that seemed OK, so there it is in the headline.

Will the lack of Power cost us promotion? How many more games will he miss, this time and after Christmas?

Fortunately, Pete Sixsmith’s seven word text winged its way up the M6 as the whistle blew to tell us we have more heroes than villains:

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Walsall Who are You?: (1) ‘SAFC-Newcastle the most antagonistic game I’ve seen’

Richard Hall

Monsieur Salut writes (and guess how easy it is to write Monsieur Slut by mistake): I knew some games would be a struggle for Who are You? and Walsall away this Saturday was already proving a challenge before we were duly drawn against them in the FA Cup for a week later. Richard Hall*, located by the usual online searches, agreed to have a go. So why not get him to do both games; why not go back to him for the return league game?

So Richard’s answers on the League One match, and revelations about his cultural tastes (Shostakovich fifth, the works of an American ‘Marxist humanist’ Raya Dunayevskaya and even a spot of Michael Jackson washed down with old world wine) will be followed next week by his FA Cup thoughts. It amounts to another great read in this series. And Richard knows the North East well, having worked in Middlesbrough, lived in Darlington and joined a friend for games at the SoL. But we’ll try to spare him a third set of questions …

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Walsall vs SAFC Guess the Score: winner gets the new TFTRW book

Jake, our illustrator based out in Spain, has some news of his own. Watch this space

According to our Walsall “Who are You?” candidate, whose thoughts have just landed and will be published on Thursday, we will either be thrashed 4-1 “because we love being the underdogs”, or Sunderland will romp to victory “because sometimes the wheels really do come off”. Nothing in between.

And for the FA Cup game a week later, he reckons we will batter them for most of the game but lose 1-0.

Most of that is emphatically not what it says in the script, writes Monsieur Salut. After missing an open-goal chance to go top by beating Wycombe Wanderers, we must regain our former momentum. Barnsley, next up after this game, are looking good again and breathing loudly down our necks.

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Barnsley and Doncaster (and Accrington?) push Sunderland down and Walsall out.

My  “how’s it going?” piece went up on Friday, as per usual over the last few international breaks, and elicited few responses, as per usual over the last few seasons. I had expected one or  two Coventry ninjas (there can’t be many more than two) to pick up the series and comment but it appears to be beyond them.

Not that it matters. One appreciative reader, Edward, made a comment  and that got me thinking, so I did a bit of fiddling with the spreadsheet and here we are.

In some ways this post is similar to Friday’s. However, there is not only an update there’s also a change of emphasis. Sunderland, of course, are the main focus but, for the first time this season, Walsall and Doncaster come into the discussion, which is something they’ve merited for a while, and I’ve also included Accrington, new entrants to the play-off spots

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Coventry are base as Peterborough join Charlton, Barnsley and Portsmouth (and SAFC) on our watch list

There should have been an update to this series (see the archive links below for the earlier posts) at the start of the season but I travelled up early for the Charlton game, spending the Friday in Leeds before driving on to the North-East, then when I got back home I did a match report to complement Pete Sixsmith’s and didn’t have time for anything else.

This was followed by five games in two weeks, with no space to fit anything in, and here we are.

This means my last post in the series was the one that explained the role of Coventry City‘s fans in propelling their club up and Sunderland down in our poll and asked who should be the sixth team to join Coventry, Sunderland, Charlton, Barnsley and Portsmouth in our  deliberations. Peterborough was the very clear preference from the four choices offered; they got more votes than the other three clubs (Southend, Plymouth and Luton) combined.

Those six will be the ones we start with, and I can’t imagine it changing before Christmas.

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Burton, Scunthorpe or Peterborough – who’ll join Sunderland, Barnsley, Charlton and Portsmouth?

UPDATE: we saw the poll had grown, improbably, to 11,000+ votes with Coventry way out in front on 26 per cent. Couldn’t blame Jimmy Hill this time but something was clearly up.  For the culprits, go to the Coventry site Sky Blues Talk    … but don’t get too cross as our lot would gladly have done the same to them. The poll, unsurprisingly, is suspended …

After Colin reposted our “who’s going up?” poll (on the left, below) in one of the Question and Answer sessions  with our owners there  was brief flurry of voting, as you might have expected given the number of visitors we had. And then things slowed down until, by the weekend, things were at a trickle, although votes were and are still coming in. Again, this was to be expected as the eyes of the football world were on Russia, where eight or nine ex-Sunderland players were taking part in the World’s most prestigious competition outside the Third Division. We now have over 800 votes cast, which is enough to be going on with, although Colin in his gut feeling poll, had almost as many when only one vote was allowed per person.

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Barnsley drop, Burton and Posh replace Luton and Scunthorpe, Walsall get off the bottom in our promotion poll.

When I first put this poll up, a mere week ago, I wrote

“this is predominantly a Sunderland site and we aren’t claiming results are totally unbiased… …Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to say that SAFC  fans have not been blindly optimistic.”

After only a week I would not able to add a lot to this statement, were it not for two things. The first is that the poll was tagged to promote it to all League One fans for over 24 hours before it was promoted on our facebook page and then on Colin’s subsequent posts on this site. This gave us a small (very small, as it happens) hint of what the whole of the League One fanbase might think. The second was that Colin’s own poll closed, with some findings we can bring to bear on this one.

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The bookies say Sunderland, Barnsley, Charlton, Portsmouth, Luton and Scunthorpe. What about you?

And so we have it: the fixtures are out. You’ll be getting your fill of dates, and conjecture from all over, no doubt, and enjoying the pre-season buzz of anticipation that it brings.

But when you’re tucked up under the sheets, reading Charles Buchan’s “Football Monthly” with a torch and reality bites, do you think you’ll win League One?

Or even get promoted?

If you do, please let us know. If you don’t, let us know who you think will make the grade.

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Hail the Reserves, Cup Final conquerors of Walsall



It is always a pleasure to receive an upbeat text message from a Sunderland match I haven’t been able to attend (we won’t go into how many of those there are these days).

Pete Sixsmith’s, from the Eppleton CW ground, read last night:

We are now the proud holders of the Tote Cup after beating the mighty Walsall 3-0. Cook and Tounkare (2)

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