So Steve Bruce has gone, fired today as the inevitable casualty of his team’s abject failure to get results to match Sunderland AFC’s spending and the supporters’ reasonable expectations. It is not a great day for SAFC, which remains for now in a mess. Salut! Sunderland finally and reluctantly came off the fence after the Wigan debacle and acknowledged the need for change. We had promised to reserve judgement until the end of November; our deadline, the last of the month’s games, passed without trace or hope of improvement.

Now Ellis Short has taken the required action. Or part of it. We wanted the club to have a replacement ready, not run the risk of a leaderless chasm. That was a tall order and no one appears to be lined up to take charge with immediate effect, unless Short has a trick up his sleeve and it is merely a case of dotting Is and crossing Ts. We’ll be watching and praying …

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In an ideal world, bright SAFC publicity people would have told Pete Sixsmith: “Get yourself along to the Reserves; someone’s due a hammering.” Instead, the 7-0 demolition of Scunthorpe was out of bounds to Salut! Sunderland and practically everyone else. So Pete joined Steve Bruce and others at an FA Youth Cup game – and saw us beaten…

Away from the brouhaha surrounding the continued employment of Steve Bruce and the sadness surrounding the tragic demise of Gary Speed, there has been some football played.

In the afternoon, the reserves demolished Scunthorpe United 7-0 at the Academy (but we’re not allowed in to watch) with Ryan Noble getting a hat trick in four minutes. Pity he couldn’t have done that against Fulham. He must be in line for a place on Sunday and if on the bench, and will with any luck be given longer than last time on the field.

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One of Monsieur Salut’s regrets is that although certain readers have taken a strongly pro-Bruce – or anti-kneejerk – line none has recently accepted the open invitation to put such thoughts into a full-sized posting. Yet there’s no shortage of hostile comment, as the latest Birflatt Boy offering demonstrates …

Let’s not beat about the bush on this issue.

The overwhelming majority of Sunderland fans not only want him gone after the debacle of losing at home to Wigan. Not only do the fans want him gone, they expected him to be gone already.

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The last time I saw Sunderland get seven was against Oxford United under Peter Reid in 1998. Two apiece for Bridges, Dichio and Rae and one from Mickey Gray.

Well, the Reserves did it again today, whacking seven past Scunthorpe, as in the Oxford game without reply.

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For most proper supporters of Sunderland, or indeed any other club, the commitment is unconditional. We may be scattered around the world, and the team/s we follow may experience varying fortunes, but we broadly want the same thing, week after week: success at whatever level we happen to be playing.

Younger Sunderland fans have known only the Premier League and upper end of the division below. The codgers have seen the old Third Division for one season and been close enough to another dose. Our allegiance has survived intact, and would do so again in the event of yet another relegation.

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Long experience of coroners’ courts has persuaded Monsieur Salut that depression can afflict the most successful, normally intelligent of people. We do not yet know what drove Gary Speed to suicide. Jeremy Robson offers a little more than the sympathy everyone feels …

Only Ryan Giggs and David James have played more games in the Premier League than Gary Speed who, sadly, was found dead yesterday at the age of 42.

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There are not that many Sixsmiths about, but even if you leave aside the one who used to be on telly (Martin?), the surname does not end with our own big Pete. Step forward Phil Sixsmith, his younger brother, who lives in Greece, a place that makes Sunderland (and the UK)’s crises seem positively benign. Phil dearly hoped his latest visit home might offer a rousing afternoon at the SoL …   

Certain fish and chip shops in the Wigan area serve a local delicacy that consists of a bread bun cut in two, dipped in the juice from the bubbling mushy peas pan – pea wet as it is rather alarmingly called – with a potato and meat pie between the pieces of bread. Served with a generous portion of chips, it has a fat and carbohydrate content sufficient to fuel Bradley Wiggins over at least half a dozen Alps.   For the first 40 minutes of the match on Saturday, the Wigan players must have wished they’d gone back for seconds as they were forced to chase a slick, efficient, enterprising Sunderland side all over the pea wet green turf of the Stadium of Light. One goal was poor reward. Brave goalkeeping and a dreadful miss from Bardsley had frozen the scoreboard, but we weren’t worried. Second half would be a breeze. (more…)

M Salut thanks the readers of this site for their angry, acerbic, amusing and appreciative comments received in recent days, weeks and months. There may be important SAFC news in the day or days to come and there may not; either way, that will inspire more comment.

But I do need a degree of patience and understanding from you all during the same period.

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Steve Bruce looked a broken man on Match of the Day. Some of the abuse lobbed at him, Salut! Sunderland believes, was unacceptable, but it had hit home. To a large degree, of course, he is the author of his present misfortune. Jeremy Robson, hardly a born again convert to the Bruce Out cause, discusses this latest calamitous era of Sunderland’s managerial history …

For followers of this fine club of ours there has been a sorry history of underachievement apart from the two seventh placed finishes under Peter Reid and the solitary FA Cup win in 1973. I watched it again last night and for the very first time experienced the realisation that this was a long time ago.

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Pete Sixsmith, with apologies to Bon Jovi (or was it a band called Europe?) for his headline choice, is fed up. From Bardsley’s impersonation of Jonny Wilkinson (can conversions be that high in rugby?) to the kamikaze defending, yesterday was no day for faint hearts; Sixer’s nearly gave up the ghost …

At 4.49 on Saturday, the usually reliable Wes Brown made an elementary error to hand Wigan Athletic their first away win of the season and, in all probability, start the process that brings down the curtain on Steve Bruce’s 30 months in charge at the Stadium of Light.

Brown’s error was inexplicable, on a day that featured hapless central defenders in Wesley, the manager and David Corner, dragged from well deserved obscurity to do the half time draw to applause that was so muted as to be almost sepulchral. However his error at Wembley did not lead to howls of derision coming down from the stands. Brown’s did.

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