A great day out, says Pete Sixsmith, but – like the curate’s egg – only in parts …

Burnley shimmered in the summer sunshine as the crowd filed in to Turf Moor, clad in shorts and t-shirts rather than the waterproofs and overcoats that one associates with this wet and windy part of North East Lancs.

Behind the ground, Burnley III were playing Ramsbottom III in front of a decent crowd of cricket and football fans, who were no doubt appreciative of the fact that the England pace bowler James Anderson learned his trade here.

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Managers cannot lose with pre-season friendlies. Win and the Lads did well. Lose and it doesn’t really matter; it’s all about fitness.

Let us hope fitness had a boost today as there was precious little to get excited about in the way of Sunderland’s performance, according to our own Pete Sixsmith.

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Better late than never, Pete Sixsmith reflects on his trip over the border …

A favourite quiz question was “Name three senior clubs who play at grounds named after other sports?” One of them went when Derby left The Baseball Ground, another when Wrexham’s Racecourse became a non-league stadium, leaving Kilmarnock’s Rugby Park the sole remaining part of the poser.

It is a decent stadium, with an old grandstand and three modern “throw them up quickly” stands. The current capacity is 18,000 (not challenged on Tuesday night) whereas the old standing ground was double that. It was quite a recent record as well, for a SFA Cup tie with Rangers in 1962, which they lost 2-4.

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Not the toughest of pre-season opposition but good to record a win all the same. And 399 SAFC supporters were counted among the 2,333 crowd.

Thanks to the combined efforts of the safc.com live text team, and Mr Peter Sixsmith of this parish, I knew fairly quickly that we had taken the lead at Kilmarnock and soon after the end that we had beaten them 2-1.

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Image: KetuGajjar

It was a line-up that included bright young hopes for the future and men who need to get away, for the sake of their careers and also Sunderland’s player staffing levels.

And they did something the senior team has not managed for nine years: win away at Arsenal. Arsenal Reserves 1 Sunderland Reserves 2.

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Well, that’s the retirement malarkey over and done with. Thursday at work was an emotional day, culminating in the presentation of a framed, signed photograph of the 1973 FA Cup winning side. It is now replete on my living room wall, sandwiched between a photo of Niall Quinn and another of Marco, rolling the second goal past Fat Burridge in 1990.

The day on the Trans-Pennine Ale Trail went swimmingly. If the old maxim “A man can be judged by the quality of his friends”, then I must rank somewhere between the Dalai Lama and MK Gandhi as a truly wonderful person.

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Image: Mrs Logic

The personal e-mails from Steve Bruce after each match have not yet resumed. When they do, we’ll find a collective name for them. Bruce’s Blarney is tempting; last season, there were times when some Salut! Sunderland readers may have thought Bruce’s Bluster would fit.

But it is useful, all the same, to see what the manager has to say, even if the e-mail (personal to me but also thousands of others) contains thoughts marshalled or massaged for circulation by a press officer. And today’s thoughts, after a 0-0 draw with Borussia Monchengladbach left us winless but with positives to draw from three friendlies in Germany, were demonstrably his own since he gave voice to them on SAFC TV.

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Steve Bruce swore until blue in the face that he was right not to replace Darren Bent in January.

Salut! Sunderland was equally adamant that Bent should not have been allowed to go anywhere without a replacement – even a stopgap one – lined up. We allowed for the possibility that what Bruce took to calling a “calculated gamble” was not his choice, but thrust upon him by an owner thrilled to bits with the business aspect of Bent’s sale to Villa.

If he really was content to muddle through with one fit first-team striker, pinning hopes on the returns in due course of Danny Welbeck and Fraizer Campbell, then that stands, in my humble view, as his biggest error of the season.

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ALS T-shirt, presumably yours for a song

Three great Darren Bent comments posted at the Blackcats list in recent days, linked to Steve Bruce’s own pursuit of new recruits, deserve wider currency. I haven’t specific consent so will limit attribution to initials:

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Sixer’s Soapbox gets Pete Sixsmith instead of the usual illustration today in honour of a big event: his retirement after serving nobly as a teacher (bring on the chalkface, blackboard jungle cliches) for something approaching 40 years. He wished the occasion to go unnoticed but it cannot. Ferryhill Business and Enterprise College is an odd name for a secondary school but that is where Pete has done his teaching, and there will successive generations of past pupils to testify to his skills. M Salut’s bet is that there are plenty of people out there who have done better in life than would have been the case had they not encountered Pete as Sir.

And the “horror show” has more to do with frustrating attempts, as described by Pete, to keep track of events in Hannover than with any serious failings on the playing front: this was useful opposition, significantly ahead of Steve Bruce’s squad in the pre-season build-up, and we still gave them a decent fight for it in the second half …

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