Page 31 - 360633 LP236168 A Love Supreme 48pp A5 (April 2022)

DJIBRIL CISSE
BY MICHAEL LOUGH
I’m sure older supporters will scoff at the notion of me naming a striker who scored just 10 league goals in a season where we scraped survival by the skin of our teeth as the favourite of my generation, but I’m still in a huff with Jermain Defoe so we’re just going to have to roll with it.
Before I wax lyrical about our number nine with designer facial hair and the flashy underwear, let me provide you with a bit
of context regarding my early Sunderland-supporting life. Despite being born in 1995, I am very much a child of Howard Wilkinson, the first game I can remember taking an interest
in was a rare 2-1 victory over Liverpool and the first game I ever attended was the infamous ‘three own goals’ defeat to Charlton Athletic. So although I saw Super Kev play in the flesh, it was hardly in the prime of his SAFC career.
Over the next couple of seasons I wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice in terms of strikers to heap praise on. Sure, Marcus Stewart was something of boyhood hero as he fired us to the Championship title in 2005, and if ‘Baby give it up’ is played on a night out in town, I still give a hearty rendition of ‘David Connolly, Connolly’, but it’s safe to say the years 2002-2008 were bereft of household names leading the line in red and white.
That was until Cisse came to town. The Frenchman arrived on Wearside with a pedigree I was not used to seeing. To my
untrained 13-year-old eyes, he was simply box office, he donned a new hair colour almost every week and
I remembered watching him score for Liverpool in the 2005 Champions League shootout and the opener in the 2006 FA Cup final. Just over two years after we ended the season with the likes of Jon Stead and Chris Brown leading the line for the lads, I was entitled to get a bit carried away.
Cisse made an immediate impact, scoring his first goal for the club just minutes after coming off the bench to secure a 2-1 win for the lads at White Hart Lane. He would truly write himself into Sunderland folklore when he put on an absolute masterclass when we beat The Mags at home for the first time in 28 years.
Not only did he score the opening goal of the game, but hit the post and fizzed a long range effort just over the bar that had Shay Given beaten all ends up. In the second half of the season his ability and application didn’t hit the heights of his pre-January form and he scored just twice more in the league from January onwards.
Despite this, he crucially netted the only goal of the game as we squeaked past Hull 1-0 which ultimately saw us retain our Premier League status. His stay on Wearside may have been short and sweet, but his flamboyant, undoubted talent and habit of putting the ball in the Geordies net makes Cisse one of my favourite strikers to pull on a Sunderland shirt.
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