Ready To Go : Yankee Mackem

Are we the Mets or the Yankees? Sunderland Start the New year with a Whimper.

Thoughts on how much we need Toda.

SUNDERLAND NEW YORK
‘We wanted the Yankee stadium but got the Shea instead’

It’s snowing in New York. I hear that its been snowing in Sunderland as well.

I arrived back from my winter holidays at JFK airport at midnight. Tired and deflated after a day of travelling, the falling snow coming down in gentle drifts and swirling around me shoes like an icy maelstrom reflected in the bright overhead lights of American Airlines terminal eight. The -6 temperature made sharper by the wind-chill, the icy air so cold that it stung my lungs with every breath...

However, to be honest my mind was on other things then just the temperature. I’d tried to watch the lads while I was away but the only bar on the island showed only Arsenal or Celtic matches… in fact although I had fox sports world and BBC world, I’d even managed to miss the Man U game (it wasn’t shown). I’d only found out the results by being glued to the full times score board and even then we barely got a mention. Once more Sunderland seemed to starting the New Year with a whimper.

So here I was. My thoughts drifting just like the thick snow outside the taxi window, and the hour or so journey was lost in thoughts of relegation and hammerings by lower division teams.

Yet It wasn’t long before even these dire thoughts were distracted by a brilliant group of neon lights to my right, the brilliantly colored beams piercing the falling snow and outlining something familiar.

As I stared the blizzard parted for a second and I found myself staring at a huge shape of a man holding a bat.

For a second I wondered what it was but then, all of a sudden, other shapes appeared out of the darkness too, a huge concrete mushroom and a massive silver globe and at that moment I knew precisely what I was looking at. I realized that I gazing at the walls of the Shea Stadium.

You probably know it from the ending of the film ‘men in black’ (its right next to those saucers on stick things) but It’s not hard to miss. 50 feet tall and towering above the smaller tennis stadia around it, the Shea is one long modern concrete wall that has been superficially nipped and tucked in its design so as not to offend, or at the same time detract from, its bland, faceless concreteness.

It is, needless to say, a big pile of unimaginative sand and lime. On its side (and it has a lot of it to cover up) are 20 foot high tasteful neon-lit baseballers that glow, very much like our own plastic black cats that now adorn the new stand, into the snow filled night sky like a call to arms for its legions of fans.

This fact that I thought of the Stadium of Light when i saw this was highlighted half an hour later when I passed the Mets neighbors, the Yankees. Yankee Stadium is different thing entirely, a far simpler stone affair, a well fronted structure of pillars and neat brickwork that seems to ooze a different level of class to the Shea entirely. It says history, and it says class. It wasn’t particularly well lit, or for that matter better situated by the bronx river parkway, but the differences were striking.

Two years ago Sunderland supporters were promised a Dynasty like this teams, we were promised the Yankees. We got the Mets, only without the money.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Mets club, they’ve been extremely successful in their own right, as well as being well supported and fanatically cheered on by their legions of supporters. But looking at it from afar you have to get the feeling that they have the same Image counselors as Sunderland. Because it’s not how they are viewed inside the state that matters, it’s how they are viewed outside.

This is what I rally want to talk about today.

Here are two teams that are leagues (literally as well as figuratively) apart in terms of publicity. The Yankees are an internationally recognized trade name with merchandise that sells everywhere, (Even in NYC people tend to wear the Mets NY baseball caps more as an unusual antitheses of the more familiar Yankees NY), if you're british the Mets are a team that you wouldn’t know existed if you didn’t trip over their stadium while turning up to watch the Tennis…

In 99 and ’00 Sunderland should have capitalized with their success, they should have used the international scene to bring in players. Instead of bringing in 4 million dollars (at least) worth of cover for the midfield that never got a game, why didn’t we bring in 4 million dollars worth of overseas names??? Their value in sales and overseas support has proved countless with other clubs, even without playing them and as is the usual case for Sunderland AFC, we only now seem to have cottoned on to little too late. With Reyna we had a chance to break into the American market:
“I’m only interested in supporting Sunderland so long as Captain America is there.” One US supporter recently told me. Isn’t there a message here for the club? That Sunderland could have had, and still could have an overseas dynasty??? If only it wasn’t so inwardly looking. If only they’d do something extravagant (Ditch the Advertising on the shirt!!!)

As an overseas supporter in exile I find it tragic that Sunderland AFC have neglected the foreign legions. While other clubs toured the world in the pre-season we seemed to be stuck in northern Europe, we’ve even neglected historic ties with European teams like Athletico in favor of a quick ferry journey across the sea.

Right now Sunderland, like the out of favor kid in school, is jogging to keep up with world football and is already out of breath. It seems to believe that ambition is something reserved for other people and we have reacted far too slowly to the expanding world of televised football and much too late, realizing that foreign players bring revenue only after every other club with ambition in the league has already seen it. When we were doing well we seemed to have a paper bag on our heads, one that didn’t allow us to see anything else in the world other then a 6th placing that never materialized.

Oh we gave it a try with Mboma. We prodded him with the dipstick of wearside football and then decided that we didn’t like the way that it felt. Yet aside from Reyna this is all we came out of the last World Cup with! Unbelievable.

Right now I must applaud Wilkinson for having a look at this new Kid Toda. Critique the manager all you like, he is doing what needs to be done and is at last breaking the tight mold that seems to be blinkering Sunderland’s international eyes.
Yes, realistically, if we had the money I’d strip the 1st division of the best players and grab a hand full of experienced old hands from the Premiership any day but we’re not going to get that.

But what we also need is something that is realistically in our reach (and this is something that we have always been desperate for as a club)... a decent player, a real character, and a media breakthrough outside of the UK. We need an International Bally.

We might get one, we might not.
But we certainly need him; whoever he might be. Sunderland should always be forward looking.

Ha’way the Lads

And that’s all there is for this time around… remember if you have any questions regarding New York or Sunderlands supporter association in the USA then please feel free to drop me an email by clicking HERE . Also if you know of any good bars in the USA (or wider world outside the UK) that show football and that are not mentioned in the bar list … and yet feel that they should be, then get in contact and send me the details, I’ll stick them in the list as soon as I can.