Page 90 - 368603 LP250721 AWY AWY AWY Book (238pp A5)

Brom match a few weeks before and seen us pull off a great 3-2 victory. We sat in the middle of a huge bank of our fans along one side of the ground. We never got into the game much and when Bob Latchford nodded them in front early on, attention started to focus heavily on what was happening in the other game. Bruce Rioch put them two-up in the second-half and after that the teams could have walked off and gone home as hardly any of the Sunderland fans were paying them much attention.
In those pre-mobile days all manner of horrible rumours did the rounds of the terraces and that evening was no exception. At one point nobody around me was watching the match while all attention was focused on two blokes with transistors sitting far apart and giving different scores from the Coventry v Bristol match. A crucial factor was that their match had started about fifteen minutes after ours, which it shouldn’t have, but this was put down to traffic problems. When Everton went two-up in the second-half, the story always was that Coventry chairman Jimmy Hill had communicated our score to the players there and for the last part of the game neither side had made any effort to win and they’d passed the ball around among themselves to keep the score level and ensure their mutual survival and our doom. Jim Holton had played for us earlier that season before transferring to Coventry and in his biography he states that that’s exactly what happened. Coventry were later ticked off by the F.A. and after that whenever Jimmy Hill showed his face at Roker Park to do ‘Match of the Day’, there were many
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