Page 31 - 358264 LP231909 A Love Supreme 48pp A5 (Issue 257)

against us came as we lost 3-2 in November 1909. He kept his nose clean in games against us in his two years at Arsenal, but managed the final goal of the game for Preston in September 1913 as we drew 2-2 at Deepdale. Five goals in eighteen appearances against us give Alf a haunting level of 8/10.
in 2003, and again as we lost 3-1 there in December 1996, but as we finished that season top to Derby’s second, that goal wasn’t too damaging. With two goals in nine games against us since he left, tempered by the fact that we love him, he gets a haunting rating of 6/10.
Lewis Grabban arrived from Bournemouth on
a season-long loan for the 2017-18 season following our demotion from the Prem. He
did everything we hoped he would, scoring regularly and had a dozen goals by the turn of the year as we sat second bottom. Who knows where we’d have been without those goals? Well, I do. Bottom, which is precisely where we ended up. Perhaps a more pertinent question would have been “who knows where we’d
have been with had he not got too big for his boots?” Obviously believing his own publicity, he invoked a clause in his loan deal that took him back to Bournemouth. Cowardly or seeing into the future? You decide. He played precisely no games before being loaned to Villa, who must have been impressed by the goal he scored at Villa Park in November as we lost
Moving forward a couple of decades, Charlie Buchan, one of the English game’s first superstars, left us for Arsenal, the club we’d signed him from in 1911. Despite being interrupted by the Great War, Charlie’s Sunderland career brought 411 games and 222 goals. His transfer in 1925, as he approached the age of 34, was complicated. £2000 up
front plus £100 for every goal he scored in season 1925-26. He managed 21, including the first in each of our league games as we won3-2 at home and lost 2-0 away, and they were the only times he did the dirty in his six appearances as an opponent. A goal every three games matches Alf Common’s haunting level of 8/10.
Moving forward to more recent times, Martyn Waghorn was a promising youngster who
only made the eight appearances for us and was loaned to Charlton and Leicester before moving permanently to the latter in 2010. He moved around a bit since then, featuring for Wigan, Rangers, and Ipswich before fetching up at Derby. It was in his single season at Portman Road that he played against us, scoring in that rotten 5-2 defeat in Suffolk on September 26th. With a strike rate of a goal every other game, that’s another 8/10 haunting.
Darren Bent was an established goalscorer when he arrived in 2009, and he’d scored thirty-six goals before he left in slightly acrimonious circumstances in January 2011. Since then, he’s scored against us for Villa
as we lost 2-0 and for Burton as we drew 1-1. Probably because many of us still rankle at his departure, when the status of SAFC legend was very much on the cards, I’ll give him a haunting rating of 7/10.
Marco Gabbiadini had played against us twice for York before he came to Roker and established himself as an all-time favourite with his goals and all-action style. After his departure he placed us nine times, all for Derby, and scored twice. Once in the opening day 5-0 thrashing at the Baseball Ground
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