1Sunderland.com

Our reward for beating Bolton yesterday…

Blyth or Blackburn at home. Why is it we must play Blackburn ten times at home this season?!

(and no, I’m not going back to regular updates!)

As you’ll have noticed, going to 1Sunderland.com now takes you to this blog - it’s been three months since 1Sunderland closed its virtual doors, and while I will be keeping the archives up (at least, until the day comes around when I disappear offline), you’ll now have to go to www.1sunderland.com/news to find them.

At least this should mean that I will be able to add any link exchange requests (which I have still been getting despite the closure of the old site!)

Just a quick post to wish everyone reading this (all three of you!) a happy new year - here’s to a cracking 2009, with some more activity on this blog than we’ve seen so far!

Quelle f****** surprise!

So Ricky Sbragia has replaced Roy Keane as manager, signing an 18 month deal….

I could have sworn we had 30 applicants with “amazing CVs”. Hope Quinny has someone up his sleeve, because this is a step back for SAFC as far as I am concerned.

Same old Sunderland, no ambitions. More when I’ve calmed down from this…

Its been a shade over two weeks since Roy Keane walked out on Sunderland, and since then the fortunes of the team have taken a real change for the better. Eight goals scored, two conceded, six points (almost seven if we’d drawn against Manchester United), and there’s a few questions to be asked.

Did the players pull off the trick that we usually see at Spurs and simply not play for Roy towards the end of his reign? Judging by the performances, you’d have to say yes - it’s simply too much of a coincidence for the team to click as well as they have done in 3 games.

So here’s hoping the next boss doesn’t fall out with the dressing room as much - which leads me to the next point. Like I said earlier, it’s been 16 days exactly since Keano walked, and every man and his dog has been linked with the Sunderland job. Not counting Ricky Sbragia, these are the names culled from the papers and the bookies:

Sam Allardyce, Ally McCoist, Alan Curbishley, Roberto Mancini, Carlos Alberto Parreria, Sven Goran Eriksson, Gordon Strachan, Dick Advocaat, Martin Jol, Slaven Bilic, Phil Brown, Gerard Houiller, Avram Grant, Ronald Koeman, Bruce Arena, David O’Leary, Louis van Gaal, Berndt Schuster, Owen Coyle, Steve McClaren, Alan Pardew, Peter Reid (?!), Frank Rijkaard, Felix Magath (WHO?!), Mark Hughes, Leo Beenhakker, Chris Coleman, Co Adriannse, Guus Hiddink, Thomas Schaaf, Adie Boothroyd, Wim Jansen, Didier Deschamps, David Moyes, Zico, Terry Venables, Darren Ferguson, Roberto Martinez, Graeme Souness, Martin Laudrup, Stuart Pearce, Peter Taylor, Mario Been, Steve Clarke, Brian Kerr, Paul Jewell, Dwight Yorke, Steve Coppell, Mick McCarthy, Claudio Ranieri, Niall Quinn, John Sheridan, Alex McLeish, Craig Levein, Gary McAllister, Billy Davies, Ralf Rangnick, Steve Bruce, Iain Dowie, Mark McGhee, Giovanni Trappatoni (Andy Reid is praying no for that one), Kevin Keegan (as are we), Alan Shearer (ditto), Nigel Worthington, Steve Cotterill, Dennis Wise, Bobby Saxton, Alex Rae, Branko Ivanovic, Gareth Southgate, John Toshack, Joe Kinnear, Serse Cosmi, Juande Ramos, Tony Mowbray, Marco van Basten and Henk Ten Cate.

Although we’re probably not going to be sorted until 2009 now, I’m giving up looking at the papers to find out the latest links to the Sunderland job. I’m sick of the tabloid press picking random European managers, most of whom from teams and countries they barely report on, insisting “we’ve heard gossip that says they’re going to be the next Sunderland boss”.

In the meantime, I’m just going to celebrate our recent revival under Ricky whose-surname-I-can’t-pronounce, and hope that Quinny gets the right man in when he makes up his mind. And here’s hoping for someone with experience, and someone who isn’t going to buckle!

In the six weeks since I last updated this blog, Sunderland have been on something of a tailspin. Only one win since we beat the Scum 2-1, and the rumours of Keane’s future started, grew, and eventually resulted in his departure. It took us 100 games, but we’ve gone from being a team that looked destined to sink out of the Championship, to a decent side stuck at the wrong end of the table in what’s been a weird Premier League season.

As we look over the tenure of Roy Keane, the stats about him having spent £75m on 33 permanent signings will scare a lot of people, the truth is that that kind of spending was needed. The game before Keane took over; on that August Bank Holiday where he showed up at the SOL, creating a stir in the process, saw us put out this squad against West Brom:

Alnwick, Delap, Cunningham, N Collins, R Elliott, Lawrence, Whitehead, Leadbitter, Hysen, Brown, S Elliott. Subs: Ward, D Collins, Nosworthy, Stead, Murphy.

Without naming names, nine of that starting XI are no longer at the club, and only one troubles our starting XI nowadays. Compare THAT squad, to the one that we fielded against Bolton last weekend:

Gordon, Bardsley, Nosworthy, D Collins, Chimbonda, Malbranque, Whitehead, Richardson, Reid, Cisse, Jones. Subs: Fulop, Ferdinand, Tainio, Leadbitter, Miller, Diouf, Murphy.

Hand on heart, can you seriously say that the team Keane has left isn’t better than the one he inherited? In fact, as a whole, the squad Keane’s left is a massive improvement on what he began with; but that’s where many of his problems came from.

As mentioned earlier, when you sign 33 players in two-and-a-bit-years, you’re more likely than not going to end up inflating your squad. No matter how hard he tried, there were some players Keane couldn’t get rid of, meaning that the next manager of SAFC will have to enter the January transfer window uttering one mantra: sell sell sell.

A quick look at our squad list shows 12 players out on loan, with realistically only Michael Chopra being a player that most people would keep on the books today (as Martyn Waghorn and Anthony Stokes possibly being close behind him). Then you look at the guys left at the club; people who we couldn’t even loan out. Folks like Rade Prica, the oft-injured David Connolly, Liam Miller. And my favourite whipping boy Daryl Murphy.

Keane’s biggest critics will point to his transfers as being his biggest failure on Wearside - signing too many average players for too much money. Then they will quickly point to his team selection, as a running joke of Keano changing his starting XI every week quickly turned into another stick that was used to beat our former boss with. It’s hard to get any kind of consistency going when you’re changing your players every week, even more so when you change the tactics just as often.

While Keane started out going for a straight-laced 4-4-2 formation, towards the end of his reign he seemed to favour the 4-5-1 system that we’ve grown to hate on Wearside, although it did generate slightly better results than his predecessors managed with it. Whether he had no faith in his players to get a result, or preferred the one-up-front formation, pretty much depends on your point of view.

This summer seemed to be a make-or-break time for Keane - entering the final year of his contract, his transfers saw us sign Djibril Cisse (albeit on loan), as SAFC finally broke through and signed a name striker who was actually in his prime, to go along with one coming to the end of his career in El Hadji Diouf. The arrivals of Messrs Malbranque, Chimbonda and Tainio from Spurs seemed like a coup, while the double Hammer raid of Anton Ferdinand and George McCartney was going to steel up our back line.

Well, that was the plan - instead, Chimbonda fell foul of Roy’s strict timekeeping rules three times in the first few months of the season, providing another reason for the neverending team changes. El Hadji Diouf got injured and went off the boil, while Teemu Tainio was never fit.

It could be fair to say that Keano ended up buying himself into trouble with Sunderland - £75m spent will have meant that a lot of neutrals would be expecting us to have been challenging for Europe this season, while the signings of “troublesome” players like Diouf and Chimbonda would have likely increased Keane’s stress.

However, after all of that is taken in and digested, we still end up with the same result. Sunderland are once again looking for a new manager, and whether you think that Roy’d taken us as far as he could with his lack of experience, or (as some think) is a coward for walking out when the going got tough, you cannot disagree with the fact that he has dragged this club up from the dark depths to somewhat sunnier climes in the Premier League.

It’s now up to Ricky Sbragia and co to steer the ship for the time being, and with (hopefully) an experienced manager coming in to take us onto the next level.

Thank you Roy, it’s been a blast!

** Note - my thoughts are from playing the PlayStation 3 release of Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 **

It’s that time of year again, where Konami and EA Sports release their latest iterations of football games and ignite the long-running rivalry between video game fans.

In one corner, you have EA Sport’s FIFA games (the latest version of which, I’ll be reviewing soon)… and in the other, Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer (for those of you who are into timelines, a descendant of the old International Superstar Soccer from the Super Nintendo). Having been a fan of both games, and a quasi-reviewer, it’s probably wrong of me to say that as far as gameplay went, I preferred Pro Evolution (at least on the PS2/Xbox “generation”), while I always went for FIFA as far as realism went.

It is fair to say that since the move to the “next generation” of consoles, PES has somewhat struggled. While FIFA was maligned for slimming its game down as it moved from PS2/Xbox to the PS3/Xbox 360, PES seemingly only had to upgrade its graphics for the high-definition generation. Somewhere in that crossover, PES has not only slipped up, but is now far behind FIFA across the park.

Out of the box, PES certainly looks the part - discounting the biggest criticism that most fans have against the game, the fact that it’s not fully licensed. Still, if your main bugbear in this series is playing as Wearside or Yorkshire Orange rather than Sunderland or Hull, then you may be a little too picky, especially now that the edit mode is back with a vengeance, allowing users to (potentially) import the corrected versions of the unlicensed sides by downloading files off the Internet and onto their PS3/360.

Fake names aside, there’s also a few flaws with the rest of the teams. Yes, we know that Konami can’t license the proper names, but is there anything stopping them from having “Wearside” playing with striped shirts, instead of the weird white shirt with a red band… nor is there anything preventing Konami from keeping up to date with the squads. It amazes me how FIFA, with the oodles of teams packed into their game, can detail Sunderland’s squad to the point where our youth team is almost fully-included, while Pro Evo manages to omit every single one of our summer signings (in and out of the club). Strangely, the licensed Premier League teams (Manchester United and Liverpool) don’t suffer this same fate… can you say lazy?

Once we’ve got past the issues of licensing and laziness, we get onto the game, and my word, what a strange feeling this is. Despite having played Pro Evolution Soccer regularly for the past five years, the game still feels weird. The system of using the right thumb stick to pull off tricks has been dumped - and this will take you a while to get used to, as Konami have decided that it’s easier to pull off tricks with the D-pad and the shoulder buttons. While using the left thumb stick to move your player. The last time I checked, my left hand only had one thumb… which does make the D-pad moves nigh on impossible to combine when your player isn’t static.

That aside, Konami seems to have done something with the shooting aspect of the game, by replacing what used to be a very accurate system with something that really is “hit and hope”. At times a quick tap of the square/shoot button will land a weak shot into the arms of the goalkeeper. Other times, it’ll decapitate the bloke in row Z.

Despite all of that, Pro Evo 2009 still has its charms. It still plays like the old PES games of old, although this game will have a learning curve for all but the most ardent PES addict. The Master League mode still hasn’t changed, and while some will point to that being a negative, it’s actually nice to be able to design a team from scratch and bring them up through the ranks. It’s even better using said team against human opposition, especially if you’ve given them a garish kit!

If you’re looking for new additions, then you’ve got two - the introduction of the UEFA Champions’ League mode, which is no-longer a stand-alone game, after Konami wrested that license away from EA Sports (although there are some fake team names, as the license didn’t include the names of every team in the contest)… and the new Be A Legend mode. Essentially it’s the same as FIFA’s Be A Pro mode, where you control a single player through the ranks, starting in a reserve team, getting transferred, and eventually winning titles. Again though, without the licenses, it doesn’t have the same feel as the FIFA mode.

Unfortunately though, the pluses of crisper graphics, the return of the edit mode and introduction of the Champions League and single player career moves, the negatives from PES’ controls can easily turn any neutrals away from the game. Overall, PES is catching back up with FIFA, but this year’s game won’t win over any undecided fans, nor will it convert any FIFA-players. All in all, a decent effort from Konami, in a year where EA excelled once more.

Well it’s only taken them 12 years - the Sunderland Stadium of Light is to hold its first proper gig on Wednesday 12 June 2009, as Oasis comes to Wearside.

Depending on the set up, I’d guess they’ll be looking to cram 50,000 into the SOL for Oasis, plus Kasabian and The Enemy, who’ll be providing the support.

Tickets go on sale on Friday October 24 via the usual outlets (TicketMaster et al) and by calling 0844 412 4638.

Sunderland have 4,000 tickets to sell via the club (in-person at the ticket office only), with those tickets being the £45 general admission tickets. Hopefully this’ll not be the last time the SOL is used for music.