Whether it’s a game of Premier League football or a game of tiddlywinks, nobody likes losing.
And yes, many Sunderland fans — including this mug right here — actually thought we’d go to Old Trafford and get
a win against a side that seems to be suffering a bit at the minute, so naturally, when you come away having lost pretty handily, it can be easy to slip into old, moany habits and start picking faults with everything.
But you have to take a step back, particularly now that we’re in the Premier League, and just remember how far we’ve come. To be disappointed at not winning at Old Trafford in a Premier League game, sat in the top half, would have been unbelievable to me if you had told me what was to come as I trudged out of the Reebok Stadium, having watched the Lads get absolutely battered 6-0 there three years ago. I just wouldn’t have believed you.
As I’ve said repeatedly, both here and on our podcast, the feeling of losing is going to become a more familiar one compared to the last eight or so years. We’ve become used to winning, so when we lose, we don’t like it, but it’s simply the nature of the beast — unless you’re one of the top dogs, you will lose a lot of games.
How we — the fanbase, the players, the coaching staff, and everyone involved at the football club — react to defeat will be incredibly important for how things play out this season from here.
There are two ways of looking at it, really — you either view things as glass-half-full or glass-half-empty. There isn’t really any middle ground. You either lick your wounds and get on with it, or you let it consume you.
I’d like to think that most of us will try to look at things positively. We all know we’ve got a fantastic manager who, most importantly, knows what he is doing, and we’ve got a squad of players — both old and new — that genuinely care about playing for Sunderland and want to work hard and do well so that we, the fans, can enjoy watching them play and keep winning games.
Everyone is here to do well and give us supporters a team that we can be proud of — and they may not be the best, but they’ll work bloody hard, and nine times out of ten, they’ll make us proud with the effort that they show in games. To that extent, they are all meeting their end of the bargain.
When it comes down to it, all we want is a team that tries.
We fans have to keep up our end of the bargain too, and that means supporting them fully and wholeheartedly. There can be no doubting that we’ve done that all season, selling out all games home and away and backing the Lads with our voices and our presence to make a real difference in games and help them to get over the line.
Let’s not allow dissenting voices to win the day — let’s keep getting behind the boys, and as I’ve said repeatedly, I think that we’ve all got a duty to call it out when someone is behaving out of order. Don’t let anyone sully the reputation of our fanbase, one that we’ve worked hard to achieve. If someone is being unsupportive in a manner that just isn’t on, I will call it out… and I hope that you will too.
It’s a shame we’ve got to wait a few weeks now for the Lads to be able to put the last result right, but the break might not necessarily be a bad thing, and by the time we play Wolves, we’ve just got to hope that we’ve fully put to bed the result at Old Trafford and are only looking forwards, and not back.
