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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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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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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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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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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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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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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If anyone out there thinks we’re overdoing the Ithics Files – reproduction at Salut! Sunderland of gems from It’s The Hope I Can’t Stand – then they should tell SAFC to get a move on with meaningful news.

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Football just isn’t what it was, lad.

Back in days gone by, you could stand with a supporter of the other team, bonded by mutual love of the people’s game, in the sure knowledge you were safe from harm.

If you were old enough to get in, you’d be in their pubs rubbing shoulders, taking turns to buy rounds and swapping jolly stories and jokes.

And if you think you just saw a pig in mid-flight outside the bedroom window, you’d be about right.

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This, the second extract from our near-complete set of the lamented fanzine It’s The Hope I Can’t Stand is a classic mixture of retrospective wisdom and downright mischief-making. Back we go to the 1997/1998 season and the origins of a fabulous Premier League strike pairing …

It is not the sort of thing anyone wants to be reminded of: even the slightest hint of hesitancy in initial thoughts on one Kevin Phillips, and a distinctly undecided assessment of Niall Quinn.

That, however, is how Ithics saw things back then. There are strong mitigating factors, and we will get to them, but Salut! Sunderland cannot resist the temptation to dip into edition No 2 – when the writer of each article was still anonymous – and repeat these snippets from a piece entitled: “Reid’s Transfer Record – Hit or Miss?”

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