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Yorkie

by Yorkie
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Guest chopey

Guest chopey

Posted
Posted

an I watch this through my smart tv on hd ?

 

Was wondering the same, though maybe worded a bit better. :bluestar:

 

I must apologise but I'm very very drunk

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Guest chopey

Guest chopey

Posted
Posted

an I watch this through my smart tv on hd ?

 

Was wondering the same, though maybe worded a bit better. :bluestar:

 

I must apologise but I'm very very drunk

 

5DAmLrq.png

 

:D

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El Hozzo

El Hozzo

Posted
Posted

From F365, from a mackem, but a fair read ...

 

A long one on Sunderland

Being a football fan of any colour isn’t easy, but being a Sunderland fan is especially hard, and has been for ten long years.

 

It’s not like we’re a club steeped in any recent success. Since I attended my first match, a 1-1 draw with Barnsley at the old Roker Park back in the 1980s, highs have been very occasional amongst years of lows. A League Cup final in 1985. An FA Cup Final in 1992, with the club languishing at the wrong end of the old Second Division. The only real continued “high” of any sort occurred for me between 1997 and 2001, as an incredible promotion chase ended in penalty defeat in a 4-4 draw at the old Wembley. The season after we swept to the Championship title and a return to the Premier League with a then-record points total, and then we proceeded – against all odds – to grab two consecutive seventh-place finishes back in the Premier League and at one point were almost in a race for the top spot with Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United.

 

Since those halcyon days – which incidentally didn’t even end in a single trophy or even European qualification – we’ve had to endure two relegations, two record-low Premier League points hauls, one moderately bright spot with promotion under Roy Keane, and then what seems like season after season of “start badly, sack manager, scrape survival, rinse and repeat”.

 

We were in the Premier League, most recently, from 2008 to 2017. But in all honesty, those nine years were nothing but an era of disappointment, mismanagement, and brutally stagnant fare, punctuated by one solitary League Cup Final appearance in 2014. My sons were born in 2008 and I have tried repeatedly to get them as interested in supporting Sunderland as I have always been, but from 2012 to 2017 I took them to no less than 12 Sunderland fixtures. They failed to witness a single goal, and every one of those games ended in bitter, gutless defeat, with none of us even willing to wait until the final whistle. I can still starkly remember an eight-year old turning around to me with 30 minutes of a game gone and remarking poignantly, “it’s all a bit depressing this Dad, isn’t it?”

 

For clubs in the Tyne and Wear area, Sunderland and Newcastle, it isn’t about being in the Premier League, particularly if being a part of the “greatest league in the world” involves watching dire, dysfunctional football played by mercenaries who simply want to scrape survival and have no ambition besides taking their own next step on the ladder. Sunderland’s repeatedly terrible performances under Steve Bruce, Martin O’Neill, Paolo di Canio, Gus Poyet, Dick Advocaat, Sam Allardyce and David Moyes led me to believe that there could easily be credence to the oft-heard rumour that Sunderland was a drinker’s club, a place that players past their prime or with little ambition go to pick up big pay packets and enjoy themselves. Rather ironically, it only seemed to be the wildman di Canio who picked up on this dark underbelly, and in typical fashion, tried to address it publicly instead of choosing the Alex Ferguson approach, and saw it spectacularly backfire in his face. But even he couldn’t address other issues within the hierarchy.

 

The chronic mismanagement in player and coach recruitment, along with dreadful PR, simply made things seem even darker than they were on the field. Acquisitions like Steven Fletcher, Adam Johnson, Jozy Altidore and Jack Rodwell cost tens of millions of pounds and rarely looked interested enough, or, in some cases, even good enough to play in the Premier League. For every Jermain Defoe, we had many more Lamine Kones. Even when occasionally the club flattered to deceive – when Steve Bruce’s forward line of Asamoah Gyan (only Sunderland player ever nominated for World Footballer of the Year), Darren Bent and Danny Welbeck dismantled Chelsea, for instance – those hopes were instantly extinguished, the club never building on any foundations, selling players at the drop of a hat and failing to adequately replace them. Ellis Short became stuck on his tried-and-tested way of desperately holding on to Premier League funds – sack, replace, repeat ad nauseam.

 

The north-east is still pretty much a traditional working-class area, still sore about the death of its heavy industry in the 70s and 80s, and one where, despite the best efforts of owners of both clubs in the area to the contrary, there is still a deeper civic connection between club and community that you may not find in many other places. I’ve heard it mentioned many times, even on Football365, that fans of both Newcastle and Sunderland have “ideas and entitlements above their station”, that we don’t deserve anything because we’re simply not good enough and haven’t been for a long time. Newcastle fans can point to more recent brushes with bigger successes – two glorious campaigns under Kevin Keegan and Champions League adventures with Bobby Robson – but even then, there is a perception that such times are now sufficiently over the horizon that there should be no ambition to recapture them.

 

But such an attitude misses out on what fans of Sunderland and Newcastle want from their teams. Despite being amongst the most passionate, partisan and loyal fans in the country, all we want to see is entertainment, from a team of players who are proud to wear the shirt and put in their best efforts, who will put in a shift and then stand their round at the bar afterwards (this being a metaphorical round, naturally, in this day and age of super-fit athletes). Win, lose or draw, it’s not the result that counts, to us, it’s just about doing your best for the club.

 

When Sunderland were relegated under David Moyes, after several seasons of stagnation, half-hearted performances and miraculous escapes, I thought that we might finally have seen the end of the turgid dross we had been served for years. I had to think back to the days of Peter Reid and, briefly, Roy Keane, to recall the last time I saw players on the field for Sunderland who looked like they wanted to play for the club. With relegation, I thought that we might clear out some of the dead wood, get a young, hungry manager, and be able to take my kids to the game with the thought that they might be entertained, and, God forbid, we might actually win more often than not.

 

It was clear within a couple of games that even relegation hadn’t changed anything at Sunderland. Sub-par recruitment, woeful management, and a general pathos that seemed to be still infesting the club didn’t take long to spread to the terraces. Newcastle fans gleefully mocked their greatest rivals – after all, the only thing Sunderland had to crow about in the last four seasons in the Premier League was their record over the Magpies – accusing them of lacking the passion that they so long prided themselves on. But Newcastle, in the same time Sunderland were in the Premier League, suffered two relegations, two instant promotions, one fifth-placed finish, one season in Europe, and the recruitment of a top-class manager with an excellent record who, in all honesty, could have chosen many other clubs above them in stature to join. Quite simply – they had hope, perhaps misplaced hope given that their governing setup was possibly the only one in the league more dysfunctional than that of Sunderland’s, but hope nevertheless.

 

Sunderland’s season in the Championship under Simon Grayson and then Chris Coleman was simply exactly the same as their Premier League days, stagnant, bereft of invention, graced by players that either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, meet the required standards. To put in the (alleged) words of on-loan striker Lewis Grabban – the club was rotten to the core.

 

So a second relegation beckoned, the club left sinking like Leeds or Portsmouth in the past. Going into the summer before the World Cup, the darkest possible clouds seemed to be hanging over Sunderland AFC. Fans clutched desperately at ghosts of the past to try and believe something might change. The names of Niall Quinn, Peter Reid and Kevin Phillips were mentioned at various levels. But why would such a hero like Kevin Phillips – the only English player even to win the European Golden Boot – want to come and tarnish his legacy by failing as so many had before?

 

I’m not sure what made the fans think that things might ever get different. Maybe it was the fact that the club was finally removed from the stewardship of Ellis Short, that change – any kind of change – might signal a reversal in fortune. Certainly, the appointment of a young, hungry manager was most welcome – Jack Ross has the dubious honour of being the first time Sunderland have ever appointed a manager younger than myself. Finally, the dead wood agreed to be cleared out, League One football clearly being too low even for their poor ambitions, and even Jack Rodwell – who should clearly be ashamed to call himself a “professional” footballer – was finally moved on.

 

With a lower wage bill, players were brought in – players most of us had never heard of. And that meant that they might actually want to play for Sunderland. Whatever the reason – maybe it was the World Cup, seeing England win a penalty shootout can make you believe anything is possible – I was astounded when I took my children to a Sunderland match on Saturday, for the 12th time, and there were queues at the turnstiles. The match was on TV, it was a midday kick-off, and still people had turned up in their thousands.

 

In the first half, it looked like nothing had changed. Sunderland looked unsure, they fell behind to an early penalty, they were out-fought and out-muscled by a Charlton team seemingly made in the image of their manager Lee Bowyer. Half-time couldn’t come quickly enough, and it seemed as if even with 31,000 fans roaring the team on, we simply were going to serve up more of the same.

 

But a slight formation adjustment at half-time seemed to make the difference. Sunderland came out with more intent and grabbed an equaliser when Josh Maja fired a low shot past the Charlton goalkeeper, and at the 12th time of asking, my children finally experienced the feeling of a goal going in at a Sunderland match. But things got even better, as Sunderland pressed over and over towards the end of the game, and in the 96th minute, a glorious cross from Oviedo was headed back past the Charlton keeper and into the net by Lynden Gooch – right in front of us. After six years, I finally had that feeling of elation shared with my kids that I’d been trying to capture for them for all that time.

 

I’m well aware one swallow doesn’t make a summer. I’m well aware that it’s one game and there was a lot that needs to be put right within the club and the team. But for the first time in a very long time, I came out of a game of football at the Stadium of Light where I wasn’t depressed, I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t fuming at the utter mismanagement of a club I’ve supported since I was eight years old. I was happy, my kids were happy, I’d been entertained, and I watched a team of players give their all for a club they seemed proud to play for. I saw a 16-year old (Bali Mumba) show a quality and maturity way beyond his years. That’s all we want in the north-east. We’re not so entitled we believe we should be competing against Barcelona and Real Madrid, we just believe our passionate, loyal and raucous support deserves better than the utter garbage we’ve been served for the past ten seasons. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve moved out of the darkness, and into the light.

James (not sure if this even qualifies as a letter now, I’ve just rambled this straight out of my head!) Rankin, Sunderland

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