8.30 and, still tired from a tough week at work, I struggle out of bed. Shortly after 9.30 our lass and me (this is one of the games the SAFC-supporting son can’t make because of school) are on the road, picking up a mate of ours at junction 14 of the M1. The traffic line tells us that the M6 northbound is pretty much closed and so I decide to continue up the M1. Rather than get quite as far as the M62 I turn off north of Sheffield and head across the Peak District. The snow is still on the hills and it is quite breathtakingly beautiful. God, I love England. One of us says, “this is going to be the best thing about today”. There is no argument.
We come off the motorway and head away from the ground and park at the Royal Oak a “Berni” style pub with a fairly small drinking area. Because of the rather long route we’ve taken it is now gone 1.30 but we still manage to get some life-saving Guinness down us. We’ve been to this pub a few times on our visits to the Reebok. It usually has quite a few SAFC supporters in and so we often bump into people we know. This time there are very few and those that are there have a strained smile on their face and speak politely rather than enthusiastically. The atmosphere is more like a group of acquaintances at a funeral waiting at a church for the family to turn up with the coffin. You don’t want to over-do the mourning bit, but you don’t want to seem disrespectful.
Shortly after 2.30 we leave the pub and head down towards the ground. It is a bright sunny March day but the cold is biting and we are frozen by the time we get to the ground. You feel like you are a metaphor in an overly-intellectual Scandinavian movie.
We get into the stand just as they are doing that godawful handshake bit. We are in the upper stand and to my amazement around 1,500 souls have made the trip. Why? Why are you all here? Why am I here?
We are playing 4-5-1. Bally obviously picked it up in one of his coaching manuals. Don’t get me wrong I love Bally. His spirit as a player was fantastic and as a man he has some truly admirable characteristics. But there was a reason he was deputy youth coach. There are quite a few games left – I hope the Sunderland supporters don’t let his inability to do anything with this team over those games sour our attitude to him.
The first half we do our common hold out quite well routine and Davis makes a couple of canny saves. For the last couple of minutes we even look a bit lively with McCartney swerving in a cross which Kyle doesn’t quite get his head to. Shortly afterwards Kyle gets booked for having the audacity to go for a 50-50 ball on the floor with the goalkeeper. As the bloke behind me says, “if he hadn’t gone for it, we’d have been rightly shouting for him to be taken off”.
The little splurt at the end means the team get applauded off. But in all honesty the support has been muted. How do you support in these circumstances? What do you support? And why?
Second half and they get a corner. It comes in at head height and near the front post Davies gets a clean head to it to glance it in. Danny Collins was meant to be marking him. Scoring from a corner is not unheard of but to get a clean header at head height in that position is just shocking.
If the support was muted in the first half, it is close to non-existent now. We know we won’t recover – and we show little sign of doing so. Bally makes a couple of strange substitutions, the exact purpose of which it is not easy to fathom. The lads behind us, who were pretty boring in the first half, keep up a constant stream of quite stunningly unfunny remarks slagging off Bally as Murray’s stooge and the supporters as idiots – the exact reason why the remaining 1,498 are idiots I never did quite discern. There is hardly even an attempt at any “anti-Murray” protesting. A couple of young ‘uns with a banner and a half-hearted chant. Even the apathy has been knocked out of us.
Breen comes on (to play the holding midfielder to let the other midfielders get forward if you are interested) and gets boo’ed. Even in our current state Breen has managed to single himself out as a hate figure. Bally would be well-advised to keep Breen off the park. There is no way Breen’s contract is going to be renewed in the summer so putting him on the pitch when he is so unpopular seems a strange thing to do.
They score again near the end. Seems inevitable. We’ve hardly had a shot on goal in the second half but going in towards the end at only 1-0 might have given us a bit of pathetic hope of a Tottenham-type miracle.
Our seats are near the exit so at the final whistle we make a quick dash out. The walk back up the hill is as depressing as we knew it would be coming down. The only good thing is that being parked that side of the motorway means we get away pretty speedily.
The M6 is clear by now so we bomb down there and the M40 because we have to pick up our sons. We get back to our town shortly after 9 to pick up some supper from the chippy. The bloke in front of me buys the last two fish. The only things left are an old pie, an unbattered sausage and a fish cake that barely looks like food. I take it, as it is too late to think of a Plan B.
At 9.30 I am settling on the sofa with my chips and thing and a nice glass of Cabernet (ah, alcohol – you have never let me down – not like my football club). Half of my week-end is over. Do I sound sorry for myself? Well, yes I am. I take the long view. Over four decades I’ve loved being a Sunderland supporter. We might rarely have much of a team but we enjoy ourselves along the way. But sometimes the short-term cack makes it harder to have any view of the long-term. Please let this end soon.