Late news just in from Lance Hardy, author of the acclaimed book on Sunderland’s momentous FA Cup Final victory over Leeds United in 1973.

He will be signing copies of the book at the Stadium of Light official club store between 11.30am and 1.30pm on Sunday – that is, before the match against Man Utd – with four heroes of our Class of 73: Jim Montgomery, Dick Malone, Dave Watson and Dennis Tueart.

If you came to Salut! Sunderland to read about Lance’s book signing, now help yourself to a spot of site navigation. See, for example, the list of recent items to your immediate left and you will get an idea of our extensive build-up to Sunday’s game, our last at home and United’s last chance – slender as events at Anfield may make it – of holding on to the Premier League title.

And then come back tomorrow to read about our planned awards to fans of Sunderland’s opposing teams who, all season, have supplied their own thoughts on forthcoming games against us.

The last contribution of the season will not be eligible for an award because it will come not so much from a Wolves fan as from someone connected to the club – and ours – in a different way. That narrows it down a bit …

Like the look of Chelsea? Gasp in admiration at Man United’s trophy cupboard? Fine, then let’s become a supporter. We can always find out where the place is later. Colin Randall, conscious of his own origins as far due south of Wearside as is possible without falling into the sea, takes a whimsical look at the hoops we should expect to go through before being regarded as genuine supporters of our chosen clubs …

Photograph of the Roker Park queues for1973 Cup Final tickets reproduced by kind permission of the Sunderland Echo

What are the tests a supporter should pass to qualify as a real fan of the team he or she follows, as opposed to a bandwagon jumper?

I have my own set of rules.

You are entitled to support Sunderland or Melchester Rovers or whoever IF one of the following applies:

You do NOT qualify IF:

1 You decided to support the club because it seemed to be very successful or had just won something important

2 You liked the club’s name

3 All the lads at school put club names in a hat and you had to promise to support the one you pulled out

That’s all dogmatic enough and I’m aware of another rule: the one about glasshouses and stone-throwing.

I believe I match up to my own demands on proper football support on rules 1-3 of eligibility. I was born far away from Sunderland – in Hove for heaven’s sake – but my family, which had many roots in the North East, Sunderland included, moved to Shildon, County Durham when I was a few months old.

Sunderland was always known as the County Durham team, whatever fiddling was later done with local authority boundaries to create Tyne and Wear. Quite simply, if you grew up in what I do not remember being called, in those days, The Land of the Prince Bishops, you supported SAFC and Durham County Cricket Club. Allowances were made if your bit of Durham was so close to Newcastle or Middlesbrough to make one of them the more obvious choice.

You could be much stricter than this, and some people are. They argue that the right to support a club is determined by one thing and one thing alone: place of birth.

But if you applied the letter of that law, it would exclude all sorts of people with long-established family traditions of support or strong links developed in one way or another with the club in question. In Sunderland’s case, it would disenfranchise thousands upon thousands of people who have, like me, always regarded the whole of County Durham as a legitimate catchment area. If only people born and bred in Sunderland were allowed to support the team, the attendances over the years would have been much lower.

Look at this girlhood memory of Kate Adie, from an interview for the Celebrity Supporters series that began life in the magazine of the SAFC Supporters’ Association London and SE branch.

“I remember thinking how curious it was as you got nearer the ground to see all these rather ancient buses full of supporters from Tow Law or Spenymoor or Crook. They seemed such far-off places. The small towns and pit villages were somehow seen as separate from Sunderland, and the one time that the divide was breached was at the match.”

I’ll go even further. Sir Tim Rice would expect to be disqualified under my ineligibility rule number two. He and his school pals were deciding who they should follow, and young Timothy liked the name of Sunderland. Yet no one could doubt that he has become an ardent and loyal fan.

Read the interview he gave me a few years ago and see if you agree:

http://salutsunderland.FootballUNITED.com/2007/03/rice-crisply-lyrical-about-the-lads/

Ineligibility rule one might also shunt Lance Hardy, author of the 1973 FA Cup final book, into the sidings of football support. At home in Nottinghamshire as a very young boy, he was placed in front of the television on May 5 of that year and told to shout for the Lads against Leeds. He has supported us passionately ever since.

So maybe my rules are not rules at all but guidelines. There has to be flexibility. What do others think?

You can learn more about the origins and depth of Lance’s allegiance to Sunderland AFC, and about his book, Stokoe, Sunderland and ‘73: The Story of the Greatest FA Cup Final Shock of All Time. when my interview with him is posted at Salut! Sunderland in the next few days.

Photos from 1973 by kind permission of the Sunderland Echo

Patrick Vieira on £150,000 a week; Kenwyne Jones valued at £40m; Manchester United with debts of £750m and tickets for Saturday at Chelsea at a tad under £50.

Money, money, money. I don’t think the game has ever been so wrapped up in finance and it somewhat dissipates the pleasure of watching a simple football match.

There were days when football, and everything around it, was much more innocent. I was reminded of this as I read Lance Hardy’s excellent book, Stokoe, Sunderland and ’73.

The title tells you everything you need to know; it’s a book about the greatest FA Cup victory in living memory, the manager who engineerd it, the players who delivered it and the fans who witnessed it and who have never quite got over it.

I got the impression that the heroes of 73 were not in it for the cash. Yes, they made a good living and they were better paid than most, but wages had not reached the astronomical levels they have now. In fact the ’73 team come across as people who loved football, loved fame and liked, rather than worshipped, money .

The book is a very exhaustive (but not in the least bit exhausting) account of that wonderful period 37 years ago. when to be a Sunderland fan was the most wonderful feeling in the world.

Relegations, cash problems, were all forgotten about as we became the nation’s darlings and slew the hideous dragon known as Leeds United. The author has been able to access 10 of the 12 players involved, back room staff, journalists and supporters and has used their accounts to recreate the days when a Wembley Final ticket could be had for a pound and supporting a football team was not an example of lifestyle choice, more something in your blood.

The book is particularly strong on the various background stories to the triumph: Stokoe’s career at modest clubs, his intense dislike of Revie, the differences between Alan Brown and Stokoe, all of which will be unfamiliar to younger readers, but which seem like yesterday’s news to me.

He makes the point that it was Stokoe’s predecessor Brown who had laid the foundations for success with his youth development programme. This gave us Monty, Ritchie Pitt, Bobby Kerr, Billy Hughes, Micky Horswill and Dennis Tueart.

In addition, it was Bomber Brown who had brought in Dick Malone and Dave Watson. What Stokoe was able to do was add three and then to encourage these players to express themselves in a positive way for four months and become legends on Wearside for ever and ever.

Stolkoe comes across as a straightforward figure, more of a man manager than a master tactician and as someone who, at this time, could get the best out of the excellent raw material that he inherited.

Hindsight is a great gift, but Kerr, Tueart, Hughes and a few others wax lyrical about his ability to get them to play as they wanted to rather than the way that the more methodical, cerebral Brown insisted on. Deep down, they realise that Brown’s insistence on doing things his way, made them better players as they matured but that Stokoe was able to give them the licence they had craved under the austere Brown. Only Ritchie Pitt has bad words to say about Stokoe; the manager didn’t rate him and was keen to sell him. I had forgotten that Stokoe regarded John Tones as a better player than Pitt.

For people like me, it’s a wallow in nostalgia, almost like a sepia tinged print of what the game was like in the days when it was much simpler and uncluttered by financial considerations and restrictions on how you watch a game.

Hardy evokes this period exceptionally well in his interviews with the players and fans, who all realise that the product they are watching now is as far away from ’73 as ‘73 was from The Team Of All The Talents.

It’s an excellent read. If you are a younger fan, read it and you will get a whiff of the euphoria of those magic winter and spring months. If you are one of those, now in their 50s and above, who experienced it, the sights, the smell, the sounds and joy of Roker Park, Meadow Lane, Maine Road, Hillsbrough and Wembley and that utterly improbable, utterly glorious story will come flooding back.

As the song goes;

We went to Wembley Stadium, it was on the 5th of May

In nineteen hundred and seventy three, what a f****** day

We showed them how to drink Brown Ale, we showed them how to sup

We showed the Yorkshire B******** how to win the FA Cup

And now, we have an away trip to Portsmouth in a competition that, in its early stages, few seem all that bothered about. How times have changed.

** Stokoe, Sunderland and ‘73: The Story of the Greatest FA Cup Final Shock of All Time. Published by Orion. Buy it at a bargain price at this link.

Just out: Lance Hardy’s carefully researched story of the 1973 cup final when Sunderland threw off underdog status to defeat Don Revie’s mighty Leeds and win the FA Cup. It needs a great leap of faith to think you’ve much chance of getting the book from Amazon before Christmas. But you can get it, by clicking this link, at the knockdown price of just over £11 (instead of £18.99 and it’s even cheaper if you opt for second hand). Colin Randall wallows in nostalgia …

Where were you when Sunderland beat Leeds 1-0 in the FA Cup Final of May 5 1973?

Not born, some will say. Or too small to care. A lot of us, though, are old enough to remember.

I know exactly where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated – the Essoldo in Bishop Auckland (they interrupted the film to announce it) – and when Diana, Princess of Wales died (in bed at a friend’s house in Middleton Tyas).

And I know only too well where I was when we won the cup: in the upstairs flat I then rented in Uxbridge, watching on television a game the man in the downstairs flat had promised I would watch at Wembley.

My neighbour was the sports editor of the Harrow Observer, for which I was working. We both had company flats. And being sports editor of a paper with a sister edition covering Wembley, “knowing everyone you need to know”, meant getting me a ticket would be a cinch.

He kept up the mantra from a day or two after we beat Arsenal in the semi-final, throughout the build-up and until the eve of the game itself.

But that Friday night, all was silent from downstairs. My colleague was a noisy drunk with a combative wife, so this was unusual. They’d disappeared to their caravan in East Anglia (they later disappeared again, but more conclusively and he was not, as far as I know, seen again in the office. I doubt, though, whether guilt at the acute disappointment he’d inflicted on me had much to do with it.) There was, of course, no ticket.

My wife, whose view of football is a but like mine on reality TV and talent shows, knows where she was when Ian Porterfield scored our winner. She was ambling back from the shops and had reached our street. She then heard an almighty roar, in a voice she recognised, from an upstairs window a little farther along the street. And very nearlky went back to the shops.

Lance Hardy, a broadcaster and writer who edits BBC1′s Final Score, knows an awful lot about sport. He has covered World Cups, Olympic athletics and darts championships. He, too, watched the final on TV and includes thanks to his parents, for plonking him in front of the set with orders to shout for Sunderland, among his acknowledgements.

I have already started dipping into a book he has produced from generous access to the family of the late Bob Stokoe, our 1973 manager; Sunderland’s winning team (with the sad exception of Ian Porterfield, who is no longer with us); former Leeds players; footballers managed by Stokoe at other clubs; assorted TV colleagues; and fans ranging from Sir Tim Rice to Paul Dobson (Sobs of A Love Supreme fame) and our own Pete Sixsmith.

Before long, I will tell you what I think of it. In the meantime, you can at least be sure of one thing: it is a subject dear to the hearts of Sunderland supporters whether or not they are old enough to have been aware of, or present, at the game.

“It was something you couldn’t put into words,” Hardy was told by one of his interviewees, Bobby Kerr, skipper of the SAFC cup-winning side “I don’t know how you are going to do it, If you can do it, it could be a bestseller.”

The greatest cup final shock of all time? Maybe, maybe not. But the story deserved telling and I am looking forward to getting properly stuck into it.

* Stokoe, Sunderland and ’73: The Story of the Greatest FA Cup Final Shock of All Time. Published by Orion.