Page 7 - 364645 LP243221 A Love Supreme 48pp A5 Aug22

I’d do it all over again.
BY JOE CABBAGE
months ago I was probably thinking the same as many and questioning the position of Sunderland in my life preferences, now I realised just why they are so high up on that list. What a night. What an atmosphere. What a showcase for this bloody marvellous club of ours. Now here’s where the
fun stuff starts.
Having almost thanked COVID for taking a decision out of my hands a couple of paragraphs ago it would now haunt me by causing disruption to my flights meaning I would miss the second
leg against Wednesday - a tie I had earmarked
to watch somewhere in the Bay Area. I’m not
sure what is worse. The absolute anguish of the emotional rollercoaster of watching a play-off semi- final in person or the utter helplessness of being totally oblivious as to what’s happening stuck in
a tin can 30-odd-thousand feet over the big blue pond somewhere.
I tried my best. I even parted ways with 30 quid to Air France for one of their top of the range streaming passes to try and watch. Needless to say, it didn’t work, nor did I get my 30 quid back. Clock watching did little to help matters, but short of heading to the cockpit to see if the pilot could find out the score for me, I was fresh out of ideas and my French for ‘how’s the lads getting on’ wasn’t up to scratch.
No, unfortunately I just had to sit it out until the mobile signal reappeared, which it did some hour or so after what I presumed would be the full-time whistle. Messages suddenly started pinging into my phone but I couldn’t look. Refrain from opening those messages and we might still have a chance of getting out of this god-forsaken league. Open them, and we could be stuck. Again.
As it is, I didn’t look. Instead, I loaded up Google and searched myself: ‘Sheff Wed v Sunderland... ENTER.’ Cue pandemonium.
I’ve chance to never again meet the woman who was sitting next to me on that flight. She’ll be delighted by that. She was enjoying a bit of sleep during a long flight, and we all know how tough it is to sleep on planes, especially as one of the four in the middle aisle. ‘Was asleep’ being the operative words, as I quickly put paid to that and earned several more scornful looks - the most distasteful of which coming from the Mrs. Who cares. We’re off to Wembley. ‘Flight attendant...beers, please.’
It was such a relief and I’d already, by that point, convinced myself we’d beat Wycombe. It allowed me to properly enjoy my holiday (have I said how amazing that was?) without every now and then getting that wave of depression a defeat would have brought. But as an extraordinary trip wore
down to its close, and social media became awash with the North East pilgrimaging to the capital en masse back
at home, it began to register that I’d not be there. Another reason for my confidence heading into the final, because of course we’d win if I’m not there.
Thanks to the message board I was able to meet up with a couple of other lads in a boozer not too far from the strip at the ripe old time of 6am, we really do take over everywhere we go, don’t we? And we all strapped in, beers at the ready.
It was strange watching us at Wembley on the tele on the other side of the world, knowing all the lads and lasses were down there and the time they were having. As it was, there were a handful of us just hoping and praying. One of those was Alan, from the NASA branch, and his pal, the American, Jim - he loves his soccer.
At 2-0 with minutes to go, as the rest of us paced around because we were still worried about what might go wrong, Jim was busy getting the celebratory beers in for the lads. Cheers, Jim. And then that was it. We’d done it. We’d conquered Wembley and we were finally out of League One. It was 9am in Vegas, we’d all had plenty to drink and I had a flight to catch. A surreal experience.
The first thing I did when I got home was watch it back,
to make sure it happened, and enjoyed a few more celebratory drinks. I may not have been there all the way for our play-off journey, but I wouldn’t change it for a thing. It was the trip of a lifetime, in more ways than one, and
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