Thoughts of another piece reflecting on our transfer activity vanished into nothing as I read the latest news on Clive Clarke, who collapsed on suffering a heart attack in the dressing room at Notts Forest on Tuesday night. The Irish defender, 27 years old, is at present out on loan from SAFC to Leicester City.

Of course Roy Keane is right to suggest that our bitter disappointment the same evening at Luton pales into insignificance when you hear that one of your players – any player, to be honest – “is lucky to be alive”.

Only at the weekend, the Seville defender Antonio Puerta collapsed during a game against Getafe. A series of heart attacks led within three days to his death at just 22 from mulitple organ failure.

And let us not forget Marc-Vivien Foe, 28, who played on loan for Man City in the season before he died four years ago after collapsing during a Confederations Cup semi-final for his country, Cameroon, against Colombia in Lyon.

Clive, I am relieved to say, is sitting up and chatting in his Nottingham hosptial bed pending the results of tests. An imminent visit from Niall Quinn, and a telephone pep talk from the manager, may cheer him up a little.

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Do we know which way we’re going?
Picture:dkodigital

Roy Keane has just over three days to persuade us that he has won the transfers debate.

His supposed targets – they include the Stoke City defender Danny Higginbotham and Southampton’s striker Kenwyne Jones – do not amount to the “names to excite the fans” billing Keano himself came up with when worries first surfaced about our activity in the market.

Both may, if they come, prove excellent assets. That isn’t the point.

What we have all more or less been saying From Word Go is that we need established Premiership level quality. And on the evidence to date, we may still need it in three out of four areas: back four, midfield, attack.

Leaving aside Higginbotham’s experience in the lower reaches of the division, Andy Cole is the only answer offered to us by this late stage. And he’s not even properly fit.

As I write, we are 3-0 down at Luton, and Greg Halford has added to his unimpressive start as a SAFC player by managing to get himself sent off. I couldn’t care less about the Carling Cup, but I care very much indeed about a performance as desperate as this just a few days ahead of Man Utd away.

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Well of course there was reason to fear them. But if – as I believe – those are the games we must expect to lose, while being prepared to be thankful when we grab a point or three out of them, being beaten today was not a disaster.

What is absolutely clear is that we CANNOT trot out dismal performances like that one last week at Wigan and hope to survive, let alone aspire to a mid-table or better finish.

Today, it seems clear, we played with bags of purpose and pride, and came close to scoring once or twice. Listening to BBC Radio Newcastle, I offered this as my blind tasting: “Sounds a brave, hardworking performance, never enough.”

Then came Pete Sixsmith’s Sixer’s Sevens verdict: “Plenty of effort but short of quality.”

And what should make us very wary indeed is that Pete, as astute a reader of any game of football as I have ever met, was making exactly that sort of comment, match after match, during the (second, if we are to be unfair) Mick McCarthy relegation season before our hopes were rekindled by Niall, Drumaville and Keano.

Two good reasons exist for having no cause to feel overwhelmed by the threat from tomorrow’s visitors Liverpool.

Gary McCallister has long since retired as a player and Graham Barber, for the same reason, won’t be refereeing.

At the Stadium of Light on Saturday Feb 10, 2001, the two men combined to turn a one-nil home win into a draw.

The ease with which Barber allowed himself to be conned by a spectacular piece of theatrics by McAllister will never leave the minds of those who witnessed one of the worst penalty decisions made at the ground.

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Tasmin: keeping faith

A warm welcome to anyone arriving in one of those periodic waves of fellow fans following a link from Ready To Go’s SMB forum.

The topic is famous fans of Sunderland AFC, familiar territory for Salut! Sunderland, where I have added to the work I previously did for 5573 (then Wear Down South), the newsletter of the London and Southern England branch of the SAFC Supporters’ Association.

Of course, I could add that if some of the people posting to that SMB thread had already been here, and read the abundant material on Celebrity Supporters that I have built up, they would not make the mistakes evident in, for example, this comment by “Roughy”:

I think there’s a difference between supporting us and just being born near Sunderland. I knew Dave Stewart in the early days and he never expressed an interest in football, Kate Adie was born here but has never said she’s a supporter.
Heather Mills says quite often that she was a Sunderland fan in her youth (and as people who’ve seen my act will know I’m know fan of the monoped witch!)
Mensi is and always has a been a supporter
Tamsin Archer despite coming from Bradford is a fan as her boyfriend/husband John Hughes (?) who wrote Sleeping Sattallite can often be seen at away games
The Tim Rice and Peter O’Toole stuff has been done to death I think they just “chose” us as their team but haven’t really been fans.

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Sit down lad, I can’t see. On second thoughts, stay put*
Picture: dkodigital

How did you spend the day after Wigan?

Since I have always regarded Sunderland as the Durham county football team, I hope as many as possible of you were following Durham County Cricket Club’s excellent victory in the Friends Provident Trophy final at Lord’s.

Some SAFC nuts, Pete Sixsmith included (hence my stand-in role on Sixer’s Sevens) were glad to have been there yesterday too, instead of at Wigan. And who can blame them?

I could not follow the cricket, but I did devote a few minutes to filling in my renewal form for the London and South Eastern branch of the SAFC Supporters’ Association. It was a necessary act of faith after the dismal events of the day before.

Passion for your club does not depend on results, nice as it is when results go well. The passion is unconditional.

Our new Irish – and any other – fans have to realise that while supporting the Lads is never boring, it also brings no certainties of success. Plenty of us have experienced those play-off blues, relegation sickeners, thwarted promotion bids and the rest.

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Scourge of the WAGS
Picture: Kieran’sPhotos.

Either the heart or the head cheered wildly for Roy Keane when he made his remarks about weak players under the thumbs of their shopaholic, London-obsessed WAGS.

But not, from where I’m sitting, both head and heart at the same time.

I was ecstatic to be back in Sunderland on Saturday to see a winning return to the Premiership. And where was I not much more than 48 hours after the final whistle? On a Ryanair flight’s final approach to Toulon airport. To Mme Salut, St Tropez – or near enough for us to be able to afford it – has the edge on Shildon.

Keano’s remarks, which I imagine will have been warmly applauded throughout the North East, hark back to another age for anyone married to a remotely modern woman.

It doesn’t matter whether she wants to shop in Bond Street, Milan or the Metro Centre. She just insists on being consulted, not being treated as part of the furniture. And being a woman, she’ll take all that consultation and attention and still complain that she’s being treated like part of the furniture.

The good old days may well have been when you could, with a straight face, recite the little verse:

A woman, a child, a dog all three. The more you beat them, they better they be.

But each component of that recipe for betterment would land you in court these days.

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In it together, but seeing things differently
Picture: krisread

As the goals went in last night, the text messages from St Andrew,s dried up. Several minutes after the final whistle, we were still trailing 1-0 according to my mobile phone, the normally reliable Sixer’s Sevens service having gone AWOL.

There’s always BBC Radio Newc**tle. Down in my den at home in the south of France sit two computers. The older, cheaper one inexplicably gives clearer, louder reception while the commentary on the newer model is a few seconds ahead. I chose the slow but audible oldie.

Talk about people attending the same games and seeing different ones. It took me back to careless driving cases at Bishop Auckland Magistrates’ Court, when one motorist would swear this happened as vehemently as the other claimed the opposite.

To Gary Bennett, a passionate Sunderland ex-player and fan whose summaries I enjoy and respect, we were “not at the races”, “probably didn’t deserve a draw”, “got out of jail”. For him, the positive was that we’d avoided defeat despite playing woefully.

Hence the gloomy tone of my running updates on Salut! Sunderland as Sixer’s Stand-in.

I cannot recall it all word-for-word, but it went from something like “0-1…poor marking…playing badly” to “Chopra out of nowhere….” to “Chopra leveller not enough” to “Chopra, John steal draw from drab performance”. All based on the critical but realistic sounding comments of Gary Bennett.

Finally, Sixer’s verdict arrived, not once but twice: “Thoroughly deserved. Chopra’s now one of us.”

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These two delightful young ladies* were a lot more confident before the game than some of us. I should know because when I chanced upon them as I hurried towards the ground, they told me so.

But no one is getting carried away. Nyron Nosworthy had his feet firmly on the ground when accepting his Man of the Match award on Sky (he wasn’t MOTM in truth, though not too far behind Paul McShane, who was.)

One game, one win. That’s all it really amounts to. If by the end of the week, we are looking at three wins or two wins and a draw, that would be different, but still not enough – given who we face after that – to warrant premature celebrations.

But whatever certain<a href=”http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml;jsessionid=0W5FQUMZMMYLRQFIQMGCFF4AVCBQUIV0?xml=/sport/2007/08/12/sfgsun112.xml&posted=true&_requestid=527144
“> sour London-tinged reports might have you believe, this was not an unimpressive performance and it was not a dire game, unless you dearly wanted the scoreline to work to script.

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Paul McShane: Salut! Man of the Match
Picture: Peadar O’Sullivan

About 20 minutes to go, and on comes Michael Chopra.

Read Sixer’s Sevens. Pete (Sixsmith) didn’t just pluck his seven-word verdict out of nowhere in the euphoria of a victory that put us briefly top of the Premiership.

At that moment when Chopra, Mag turned honorary Mackem, took the field, Pete said: “Just let him grab the winner in the 89th minute and all that bile will be forgotten.”

Okay. It took Chops – as Keano calls him – two or three minutes longer, until the dying seconds of time added on. And then he buried the ball as sweetly as you’d want a striker to do, after superb work – on the right, would you believe – by Ross Wallace, who’d played all game on his natural left.

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