That was one amazing opening day win and it took me a long time to get to sleep on Saturday night, reliving the game and the sheer excitement of the day.
I wrote last week that I thought the West Ham game would tell us a lot about this squad and the season ahead. Of course it was only one game, and it’s human nature to start to get carried away.
Some pundits have moved us out of the bottom three in their predictions and have now put the Hammers bottom, but that result has at least erased one of my
initial fears — “What if we’re not good enough, and we can’t compete?”
Well, we certainly can compete. That was a huge positive, and now we can start to build on it.
I said it was a fear of mine, yet being a positive person, I did secretly predict a 2-0 Sunderland victory, but a strange superstition is that I never voice my predictions aloud!
If I say my thoughts out loud, they don’t happen, whereas if I keep them to myself, they have a better chance of coming true! Maybe I’m just mad, but it’s hard not to get carried away after an opening day like that, and we’re allowed to get excited for a while.
“That was the best I’ve seen us play at the Stadium of Light”.
“That was the best atmosphere — alongside the Coventry game — that I’ve been at”.
“That was the best game I’ve seen live”.
On and on the positivity goes online, and when listening to people chatting, the last good game can often be the best one.
The older I get, the harder it is to compare and judge ‘the best game’ or ‘the best atmosphere’, as the number of games that come into contention gets longer and longer. My go-to game is always the 4-1 demolition of Chelsea with Kevin Phillips and Niall Quinn on fire, so can a game like that — as we headed for a Premier League finishing position of seventh — actually be beaten in my lifetime?
As I said, it’s easy to get carried away and make brash statements, so when our own Roker Report maestro Gav Henderson said that “This is the best time he’s known in his lifetime to be a Sunderland supporter”, I initially thought, “Steady on, Gav. That’s a bold statement”, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to realise that I totally agree with it.
We can discuss best goals, best atmospheres, best forwards, best defenders, best debuts and best teams until Lord Lambton comes home, but what’s almost irrefutable is the groundwork and forward planning of the club at this time.
There is (and has been) most certainly a short, medium and long-term plan ever since Kyril Louis-Dreyfus walked through the doors. We’ve all been able to see the investment in youth, the development of the Academy of Light, and the backroom staff involved in all areas of the club — whether that be recruitment, marketing, analysis and scouting — as part of a professionally-run club and business.
Even in Sunderland’s days as ‘The Bank of England Club’, football clubs weren’t organised or run to such a high standard. Even under Peter Reid, I remember someone saying that “Never again should this club drop out of this division and not be competing and moving forward”.
That phrase has scarred me for years, because we did drop down again — further down than we’ve ever dropped, in fact. But even looking back to those glory days of two top ten finishes, we weren’t this organised.
The fans weren’t as central to the club’s thinking as they are now; the club didn’t embrace the community as it’s trying to do now, and there wasn’t the same forward thinking and investment in youth as there is now.
I said earlier that I didn’t like to voice my predictions out loud, but these aren’t so much predictions as a direction we’re heading in. As said to my stepson, this may not happen in my lifetime but it will in his: the club will see European nights at the Stadium of Light, and the stadium’s capacity will need to be extended at some point.
So yes, this is the best it’s ever been as a Sunderland fan, from the base upwards, and now we do need to make sure we keep building, keep supporting, keep planning and looking forward.
A lot of praise needs to go to Régis Le Bris, to the players and Kristjaan Speakman and Florent Ghisolfi, but most of all to Dreyfus for moving this club into the modern era.
Haway, me bonnie lads!
