A Love Supreme

Michael Gray has found that when one door opens – allowing him to embark on a promising new career as a TV and radio pundit – another he wishes had closed years ago stays open, wider than ever.

As he puts it in a terrific interview in The Guardian:

“Nobody’s interested in my England caps, in me finishing seventh in the Premier League with Sunderland or Blackburn … none of the good stuff. All they want to hear about is that bloody penalty. I don’t mind that now but at the start it was one of those stories I didn’t want to talk about. But looking back, I think it marked a point where I became a stronger person and it helped get me to where I got in my career.”

So he wouldn’t necessarily thank Salut! Sunderland for repeating Stephen Worthy‘s account from the Blackcats list – except that it does add wonderfully to the folkore surrounding those momentous few seconds of a momentous day …

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In some random jottings from the world of football, Pete Sixsmith confirms that, for him, that world extends beyond the Premier League and Europe. But he finds room to extol the virtues of Spurs and cautions Gattuso on the inadvisability of butting Joe Jordan (memo to sports hacks; headbutt is a tautology – what else would the man doing the butting use?) …

No game this weekend for us after our dismal FA Cup exit. No game means nothing SAFC related to get excited, upset or abusive about – or does it?

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Rarely in recent times has a Sunderland debut been as keenly awaited as that of Asamoah Gyan, who should team up with Darren Bent to cause Wigan all sorts of problems on Saturday. That’s the theory anyway. But if you saw a Daily Star headline suggesting that Steve Bruce “admired” Gyan’s World Cup penalty miss, rest assured that he did nothing of the kind …

Alert readers will have seen that the image (below), sometimes used to illustrate Salut! Sunderland items relating to Darren Bent, is credited to a man who calls himself Addick-tedKevin and can therefore be assumed to support Charlton Athletic.

No surprise, then that Kevin should have paid his artistic tribute to Benty, who scored 31 times in 68 games for the Addicks between 2005 and 2007.

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Image: Sunderland Shirts

Until David Cameron gets round to banning foreign travel as part of his austerity programme, we will be accustomed to coming across fellow Sunderland fans wherever we go. It may be the tops they wear, though caps, badges or rear window car stickers also give the game away.

If there is a grimmer town in the world than Portadown, I don’t wish to go there. I didn’t especially want to be in Portadown the day I went looking for a man widely assumed – and sometimes, in semi-private, claiming – to be a bloodthirsty sectarian killer. The newspaper I worked for wanted his reaction to being ordered, by other sectarian killers (nominally on the same side), to get out of Ulster.
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