Social media may have upsides and disadvantages but Facebook Memories has a way of bringing back moments that may have been forgotten or intentionally consigned to the deeper reaches of your mind.
One of
the latter cropped up in my feed a few days ago, from January 2019 when my boys and I travelled the relatively short distance from Yorkshire to Scunthorpe to watch Jack Ross’s team succumb to a late strike, as the match finished in an inevitable 1-1 draw.
It was a novelty in those days to visit places where Sunderland shouldn’t really have been travelling to. Glanford Park had the distinction of being the first new purpose built football stadium in over 30 years when it opened in 1988 and had a capacity of less than 10,000. Despite the limited numbers, getting 3 tickets in the away end was absolutely no problem – happy days!
Josh Maja opened the scoring in the second half with a header from Reece James’ cross. With a teamsheet that included Jon McLaughlin between the posts, Lee Cattermole, Lynden Gooch and Aiden McGeady, there should have been no excuse for not winning. But Adam Hammill’s 87th minute equaliser ensured that we didn’t.
Just days later, Maja departed for Bordeaux and Sunderland’s season petered out to a 5th place finish, followed by defeat to Charlton in the playoff final.
Fast forward 7 years and I’m writing this on a train to London, heading for the West Ham game. One of the schoolboys who accompanied his Dad to Scunthorpe, and the many other unlikely destinations we visited in League One, is now at University in London, and we will be joining another sold out away end, hoping to do the double over the Hammers.
As in 2019, it’s the transfer window – but instead of losing one of our Academy products because they had outgrown the team, we may lose one or two – Dan Neil and Anthony Patterson – because our team has progressed beyond them.
Any longstanding Sunderland fan will be accustomed to the mayhem that invariably used to accompany the winter transfer window. Some of the ‘highlights’ have been memorable for all the wrong reasons – the painful experience that was captured for all the world to see on Netflix, with the never-to-be forgotten line “Why am I seeing Ibrahimovic at the bottom of this list?”
There was the perennial search for the elusive ‘proven goal scorer’, the almost annual hunt to sign a midfield lynchpin to replace a stricken Cory Evans or to shore up a threadbare central defence.
Thankfully those days are long gone, with a scouting and recruiting team that excelled in the wake of promotion back to the Premier League just a few short months ago.
The consequence of their hard work is that Sunderland AFC is already blessed with a squad of talented players who are more than holding their own in the top echelon of English football. The added bonus is that the club has been run so efficiently by Kyril Louis-Dreyfus that there is no financial pressure to cash in on any of our assets. And those assets are pretty much so well-tied down contractually that, unless one of the biggest clubs came calling with an offer so large it would be ridiculous to refuse, we can look forward to our cohort of talented players continuing to fight for a place in the top half of the Premier League for the remainder of this season.
Well in advance of the transfer window opening, the consistent message coming out of the club was that they would only be looking at two or three signings, and only if they were players who would improve the squad. So far, the only acquisition has been the promising young Ivorian winger, Jocelyn Ta Bi, apparently snatched from right under the noses of Celtic. Commentary teams across the land will be dreading the day when the Lads line up with Talbi on one wing and Ta Bi on the other!
With 16 games left, we need just a handful of points to secure our Premier League status and we sit just a few places below the European spots.
It’s all so far removed from a chilly and disappointing Saturday in Scunthorpe!
