"I hope they don`t sack Bruce, it`s taken f****** months for the Kenwyne song to take off" - Eddy Clamp, Stoke City supporter at the Oatcake fan site
"Tried to volley instead of heading it, couldn't sleep for weeks afterwards." Danny Dichio on his missed sitter in the Charlton playoff final (as explained to Rob, again at Twitter)
Eric Sweeney* is the latest addition to Salut! Sunderland‘s stable of writers. A lot of us have been fretting about false dawns. Eric – flanked in the photo by friend and brother – rightly identifies the substantial positives we sometimes overlook …
As another transfer window draws to a close it’s worth reflecting on how far Sunderland have come in the past four years.
Niall Quinn brought with him serious investment that propelled the club back to the Premier League where we know the club belongs. Roy Keane seemed to be buying a new player each passing week and our potential knew no boundaries. (more…)
Long ago, in the days of two points for a win, we started our last game of the season four points ahead of our promotion rivals Chelsea, and playing them at home. They’d win their game in hand, we knew that (and they did so, 7-0 against Pompey) but a point would see us up. Pete Sixsmith pauses from revelling in the weekend transfer fillips to remember the goal off a Chelsea “middle leg” that left us heartbroken …
Great weekend. Bring on the Blues.
When did we last sign a player from Inter Milan? That’s an easy one – never. We have now, with the arrival of Sulley Muntari from the San Siro.
When did we last sign a player who had a Champions League Winners medal from the previous season? A tad harder that one. We have done it once, in 1981 with Ian Bowyer, so we must hope that Muntari’s stay on Wearside is altogether more successful than that of the ginger haired Forest midfielder, who had an awful time at Roker Park. (more…)
It is difficult to imagine either David Healy or, now, Paulo Da Silva feeling too down in the dumps about their cameos in the run-up to the transfer window deadline. (more…)
Just when I thought I’d acted on Steve Bruce’s behalf and sold him to Wigan, David Healy has departed the Stadium of Light, not a ground he graced too often as a player, and joined his boyhood idols Rangers. (more…)
We want a re-run of Dec 4 1999 so please let the Everton cup game have tired them out; he wants Malouda to clinch a 1-0 revenge win. David Harding*, a Fleet Street foreign editor, has supported Chelsea since early boyhood and has written a book about a special hero, Gianfranco Zola,. After yesterday’s sampler, this is the full interview with refreshing thoughts on money-driven success, this season’s Premier shakeup, the Darren Bent transfer and Sunderland players he’d welcome in Blue …
Salut! Sunderland:
Thrashed at home by Sunderland. We were ecstatic, but did subsequent results for Chelsea make it less an achievement than it seemed?
Not at all. I am not saying this to be polite but Sunderland’s performance that day was one of the best by an away team at Stamford Bridge in recent seasons. The passing and movement was wonderful. Onuoha’s goal would be replayed constantly if his name was spelt Rooney. Welbeck was sensational that day. If I was a Sunderland fan the thing I would have cherished most after my joy/laughter at the scoreline had finally died down was the performance. It showed there is a real team there, not an XI capable of fashioning a one-off result. It ranks alongside the Inter Milan (0-1, though it should have been more), Everton (3-3, Fellaini was magnificent) and Liverpool (0-1 in 2008) games in recent years in terms of away teams’ performances at the Bridge.
I don’t think our other many defeats this season should diminish the achievement. We were dire against Liverpool and Wolves, lucky at Blackburn but Sunderland thrashed us. It was notable also that it was the first time I can remember a Steve Bruce team coming to Stamford Bridge and attacking.
For the latest feature in Salut! Sunderland‘s “Who are You?” series, David Harding, a Chelsea fan who has written books on Gianfranco Zola and, er, A**n She**r, covers a lot of ground: from his club’s Unloved status and Abramovich’s billions to his thoughts on cheating and Sunderland (positive) and Newcastle (not). He sympathises with the late Ian Porterfield (our hero, less successful as the Blues’ manager) but drools over another of those Sunderland lads who never played for his home town team …
Tuesday’s match still seems ages away, so stand by for a long buildup.
At the end of the season before last, we faced Chelsea at home on the last day, threatened with relegation if we lost and both Newcastle United and Hull won. Luckily, and it was luck since we predictably lost our game (3-2), they both lost and it was a case of Toon Doon. Ahead of next week’s game at the Stadium of Light, which finds SAFC in hugely different spirits, we reproduce from May 2009 this article looking back at Lads v Chelsea encounters of the Peter Reid era …
Salut! Sunderland: May 2009
So we saved the biggest, scariest matchday of the season for last. The performance at Portsmouth (defeated 3-1) reinforced doubts about our ability to claw our own way out of trouble. We approached the Chelsea game with justified trepidation. Yet it hadn’t been so long since we’d seemed to be beating them for fun.
The Salut! Sunderland headline back then was: Lads v Chelsea: what’s the likeliest outcome – 0-4, 4-1, 1-0, 4-2? (more…)
In which Jeremy Robson sticks up for Ian Holloway in his hour of need …
At the start of the season every club is required to submit the names of 25 players who will make up their squad for the coming season.
Some of us must wonder what the point of this is, as you can add players and remove them. This is what happened to Anton Ferdinand. He didn’t even have a squad number to begin the season, but soon enough he was in the squad and starting games. So what purpose does this 25 man list serve? I haven’t the foggiest idea!
Sunderland News 24/7
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