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| Colin Randall, France-based journalist and Sunderland season ticket holder, gives his perspective on the Irish revolution at the Stadium of Light. |
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By Colin Randall
09 May 2007, 3:42:01 PM
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On the taxi journey from the middle of Belfast to Aldergrove, I had things on my mind and didn’t really want to talk. The cabbie tried in vain to interest me in chat about the weather, the traffic and why I had been in Ulster.
His last shot was football. Rangers and Linfield. No surprise there, since I’d guessed he was Protestant.
Then he asked who I supported. Sunderland, I replied. "Me, too." Even that was hardly eyebrow-raising stuff in a part of the world where everyone seems to have three or more teams. It was his reason that knocked me sideways. Charlie Hurley.
Some people from either side of the nationalist/loyalist divide were still, at the time, in the habit of killing one another. A friend from a mixed orange/green marriage had shocked me with a tale of three generations of the same Linfield-supporting family, from granddad to small boy, yelling sectarian abuse at Glentoran players.
And here was a Protestant taxi driver, whose natural habitat was Windsor Park or Ibrox, telling me he shared a little of my love for Sunderland because an Irish Roman Catholic from Cork had played so memorably for them.
If it didn’t feel quite as big a cultural shock as if Ian Paisley had suddenly announced that he had pen friends at the Vatican, it wasn’t so far short.
An encounter such as that, several years ago now, prepared me well for recent news of Niall Quinn and Drumaville actively courting Irish support for my heroes. But the truth is that in decades of travelling regularly to Ireland, north and south, and frequently meeting Irish people in other parts of the world, I have come across a good few with a soft spot for my team.
In ascending order of importance, the Boylesports, Drumaville, Quinn and Roy Keane factors are inevitably increasing those numbers. As we have seen on this site, many of our new friends are likely to stick around only until Keano makes the return to Old Trafford everyone ultimately expects.
That’s fine by me, as I said at my own blog, Salut! Sunderland. Man Utd is not so much a football club as a brand, and it’s a huge one that attracts a gigantic army of supporters around the world. Many of these are not supporters in the sense that I understand, have no connection with Manchester and may not even have been there.
Sir Tim Rice, who picked Sunderland at random when a small schoolboy and has followed us ever since, put it rather well.
In a celebrity supporter interview for 5573*, as the newsletter of the London branch of the SAFC Supporters’ Association was then called, he said he would have been "quite genuinely bored out of my skull" supporting Man Utd or even Liverpool, clubs that regard winning as just another day at the office.
"I remember being very upset about Sunderland’s relegation in 1958, and even worse when we went down to the third for a season," Rice told me. "But it’s probably good for the soul. I just cannot understand how people can care that much about Man Utd unless they were brought up in Manchester."
Of course, if Keane leads Sunderland back to the sort of glory days the club has not known since the turn of the 19th century, Rice’s argument threatens to blow up in his face. Especially since he himself was at prep school in the Home Counties when he made his boyhood choice.
But I understand what he means. Our record in recent times, despite some heady promotion seasons and two seventh top Premiership finishes under Peter Reid, does not establish us as the kind of team that draws glory seekers. It’s real, grassroots football, or at least a lot closer to it than Man Utd or Chelsea, and, I suspect, will remain so even if things pick up as well as we all hope.
Supposing that is more or less what happens. Then Keane goes, and his successor struggles to keep us successful. Loads of our new Irish fans will go too, either because they are really Keane supporters, not ours, or because failure is uncool.
That will still leave the people, in Ireland and elsewhere, who liked us when we were rubbish. People, incidentally, like Christy Moore, who once told me he’d felt kindly towards SAFC since his days touring the folk clubs of northern England.
Christy was honest enough to admit that he’d be hard put to root for Sunderland if they were playing at Elland Road. Leeds are his first (English) love. How does that have him feeling right now?
Which brings me to a conclusion linked to the asterisk some paragraphs earlier. You cannot pretend to be even a bandwagon Sunderland fan unless you already know, or are prepared to learn, why one of our fanzines would be called 5573.
Colin Randall is a freelance journalist based in the south of France. He grew up in County Durham, has followed Sunderland since boyhood and has clung on to his Stadium of Light season ticket since moving to France in 2004. He runs the website Salut! Sunderland.
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