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ALS - 1 HODGSONS BUILDING - STADIUM WAY - SUNDERLAND - SR5 1BT
editorial ISSUE #259
Hello and welcome to issue 259 of A Love Supreme, Championship edition.
The wheel turns and a new sense of hope emerges. The clouds above start to separate to form a clear goal. It is optimism. Beautiful optimism. The colour in the streets, the rekindling of friendships, the pride of a city, the sense of forever in past memories of glory. Tomorrow is uncertain but in this present day we are proud. A new season in hard times
but there is one constant and it runs through the blood of generations. It is the famous
red and white of Sunderland Association Football Club. We miss absent friends. They still live through every blade of grass, every chant, every moment of triumph. We welcome a new generation. A new purpose. A bold vision. There is a long road ahead, but we are together. At last... at Last... at Last!
A new purpose indeed, those words, by Sunderland fan Chris Jarvis, sum up pretty nicely where we are as a club at the moment, after several years in a mysteriously misty, musty decline that occasionally offered up a hint of clear views of a brighter future, only for the footballing equivalent of a Fulwell sea fret to pour over the Roker End and engulf us in seemingly impenetrable gloom once again. Thankfully, the weather Gods of the beautiful game have at last, apparently, decided that the rain and fog must descend on someone else (it looks like Derby) and that we Sunderland fans will have our devotion, loyalty, and patience
rewarded with pleasant breezes and a bit of sunshine. Oh, and something to smile about. There was no open top bus to celebrate our Wembley triumph, as Roy Keane said after his promotion season, we hadn’t really won anything and it was only the start, so we’ve been left to bask in the
rays of the promotion sunshine and experience the feel-good factor creep back along the banks of the Wear and seep into whichever locality Sunderland fans occupy.
OK, before I get too soppy and sentimental, we all know that all we’ve done is turn a corner and are, for the first time in a decade or so, heading
in the right direction. The trick for Alex Neil, and the board, is to keep working hard to maintain that right direction. Our recruitment is now done on the basis of a Sunderland blueprint rather than grabbing who is cheapest and available. It’s also done in the manner of a Russian election rather than the American version, quietly, and with the minimum of fuss. The difference is that we don’t know the outcome in advance, players have arrived without being preceded by a media frenzy of speculation, conjecture, and hype.
Take Aji Alese, for instance. He’s exactly the
type of player we’ve been targeting, and I don’t mean in terms of his position. It’s the fact that he’s young, he’s ambitious, he’s had a good football education (away from Moyes, presumably) and he’s looking to play first team football rather than
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