On Saturday night, I sat down to watch the Champions League final, and you might find this odd, but I couldn’t really care less about Champions League footy and have never really paid much attention to it, so the fact I even bothered to put the match on was a change of pace for me.
See, I just don’t really care that much about anything other than watching Sunderland, and with little else to watch other than the highlights from the Chelsea match on repeat, I thought watching the greatest competition
in European football might help to scratch my itch.
How wrong I was. I just couldn’t get into it and was bored after the first ten minutes or so, despite the Arsenal goal, and found myself spending half the game scrolling and doing other things.
We’ve had tonnes of emails and messages recently from listeners to the podcast thanking us for helping them get their Sunderland fix, and we’ll be going nowhere over the summer as, in truth, it’s as vital to us lot here as it is to the people who stick their earphones in on a morning and listen to us shite on. There’s no football, per se, to chat about, but there’s still loads to discuss, so I see it, in a way, like free therapy!
There’s truly nothing quite like following Sunderland, and I’m already counting down the days until the fixtures for next season are released, by which point I can really start to get excited about what’s to come. When will we play Newcastle home and away? Where will we be around Christmas? Who have we got to start the season off? It’s all very exciting, although not quite as exciting as finding out where our European journey is about to take us – and we’ve got bloody ages until 28 August when the Europa League draw takes place, so that’s going to feel like an eternity.
If it’s not Sunderland, then I struggle to care. And after a season of immense highs and very few lows, I think I’m going to really struggle to bridge the gap between last season and the next over the coming months, even with the World Cup on the horizon.
I suppose we’ll have the chance to watch Sunderland players in action for their respective countries, which should be nice, but it’s not quite the same, is it?! Still, I am looking forward to watching the Lads represent their nations whilst simultaneously watching every single minute of it through my fingers, hoping nobody gets crocked.
We’ve got eight days until the World Cup kicks off and ten days until we get our first sniff of a Sunderland player. Omar Alderete plays for Paraguay against the USA on 13 June at 2am, followed by Qatar v Granit Xhaka’s Switzerland at 8pm and then Brazil v Chemsdine Talbi’s Morocco at 11pm on the same day.
Truthfully, I feel very little connection to watching the current England team, and I’m genuinely more hyped to see Sunderland’s stars in action. With eleven of our players heading to the USA to take part in the festivities, Sunderland are one of the most well-represented clubs in Europe at this year’s tournament.
I don’t think this is me wearing my red and white-tinted specs either, but I think you could make a bloody good argument to suggest we should have even more players at the tournament.
Even despite the fact that it looks like William Saliba is going to miss out through injury and will subsequently be replaced by someone else, I can’t help but look at the French defensive options and wonder how Nordi Mukiele didn’t get a call-up. They’ve picked Malo Gusto ahead of him, for starters, and having watched him against us last weekend, I’ve got no idea how he’s considered international quality. They’ve also called up a lad who is playing in Saudi Arabia at the minute, so the less said about that the better.
But Nordi has consistently proven himself all season at the very highest level, in the greatest league in the world, playing out of his skin both as a centre-back and a right-back. He’s already played for France, so it bemuses me that he’s not even been considered for selection. In my opinion, he should be on that plane and with the French national team in the USA.
Similarly, yet perhaps not quite as surprisingly given he’s never had a national team call-up, I can’t help but wonder how much more Enzo Le Fée could have done this season to earn recognition. In my book, he’s been Sunderland’s best player this season and has proven himself consistently against the very best opposition, so it’s a shame he never got the nod either. Although with this being the end of the Deschamps era, I reckon he’ll be given a chance next season under whoever the new France head coach is.
Lutsharel Geertruida should be there too, surely?! He’s been in recent Netherlands squads and has broken into Sunderland’s first team with sheer brute force, and was one of our most influential players towards the end of the season. He’s on the emergency call-up list in case one of his contemporaries gets an injury, but I reckon he’ll feel hard done by having not made the final cut when the squads were announced.
It’s sure to be an exciting month or so over in the States, and we can only hope that the Sunderland players taking part do exactly as they’ve done all year in a red and white strip – give it their all, work harder than their opponents, set the example to the rest of their team-mates on how to play and train, and achieve greatness, perhaps when others have doubted the credentials of their teams.
I suppose we might well see a little bit of Sunderland at the World Cup after all!
