EXTRACT - BURY AWAY - THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER...

After Southend, the supporters had decided wich players weren't showing the heart required to turn the situation around. Despite scoring at Roots Hall, Jon Stead was joined on the fans' hit list by Liam Lawrence, Danny Collins and Rory Delap. Ben Alnwick was being excused, mostly because local players traditionally get an easier ride from Sunderland fans – in the past forwards like Craig Russell and Michael Proctor were lauded as being far better players than they ever were, mostly due to their place of birth. In truth, Alnwick's positioning and kicking had been continually poor, and although he'd just signed a new four year contract, he would need to show significant improvement if he wanted to hold on to the keeper's shirt at the club.

There was to be no improvement whatsoever at Bury in the Coca-Cola Cup three days later. Many of the fans making their way to the ground would have been heartened by memories of their last trip to Gigg Lane in 1999, when Sunderland won 5-2 to clinch promotion to the Premiership, a certain Kevin Phillips scoring four of those goals. Fast forward to 2006 and, just before kick-off, the surprising news broke that Phillips had opted to stay in the Midlands and sign for West Bromwich Albion. Officially, he later said that he had been unwilling to uproot his young family and return to the North-East for a second spell, although a quick look at the league table can't have made the decision any tougher for him.

Amazingly, out of a crowd of 2,390 at Gigg Lane, around 1,200 were Sunderland supporters. Many of them were probably still finding their seats as Arnau was sent off in the third minute for the use of an elbow. A story later circulated that Niall Quinn had asked for the away dressing room to be locked after the players headed out on to the pitch. When the Bury official returned with the key, one player had been left behind in full kit. "I been sent off" he mumbled in broken English.

So, right from the off, the Wearsiders were up against it again. Although Bury were anchored to the bottom of League Two, this was potentially a major scalp for them and the red card gave them a platform to build upon. Sunderland meanwhile, were showing admirable consistency – yet again they huffed and puffed around the field but were toothless up front. Daryl Murphy looked a long way from adding to the two goals he'd scored earlier in the month, while Stephen Elliott was still desperately scrabbling for some kind of form and looking a pale shadow of the player who had scored for fun in the Championship two years previously.

The game dragged on, devoid of any real quality from either side, until Sunderland's fatigue from being a man short finally started to tell, Bury taking the lead in the 83^rd minute with a free header from defender John Fitzgerald. He celebrated by leaping into the crowd and as he'd already been booked, it was to be his last act of the evening. A second yellow card was duly whipped out by the referee and Fitzgerald followed Arnau down the tunnel.

The levelling of numbers came too late for Sunderland to get anything from the game and a Bury hammered another nail in the coffin with three minutes to go. The Sunderland defence seemed to think the game had ended when Andy Bishop raced through and lifted the ball past Alnwick to wrap the result up.

Afterwards, Niall Quinn faced the media, visibly distraught by the result and another performance that was so far away from an acceptable level as to be scarcely believable. The optimism and hope that surrounded the takeover by Quinn and his Drumaville consortium had led to one of Sunderland's worst starts in living memory. The manager who'd never wanted the job was quitting. A world class boss was on his way.

NEW EXTRACT - COVENTRY v SAFC

Here's a new extract from The Irish Uprising. More to follow...

Sunderland’s 2006/07 season began with the same fixture as in the Championship-winning campaign two years before, away at Coventry City. The Sky Blues were now residing at their new home, the Ricoh Arena, another of the epidemic of purpose-built identikit football stadiums that are slowly draining the individualism and heart from British football. Helpfully, the stadium is also located in the middle of nowhere. Coventry took the points in the opening fixture two years before, but the Black Cats went on to take the Championship title that season. With the momentum of the Drumaville takeover, a better start was expected this time.

Sadly, the message that the 2,500 fans who made the trip to Coventry in 2006 got was that a losing mentality had become as much a part of Sunderland’s identity as the red and white stripes themselves. Sunderland started vigorously despite the blazing sunshine, conditions which weren’t helped by a 1.30pm kick-off dictated by Sky Sports. For an away side, they looked well-organised, spirited, and keen to probe their opponents’ final third in search of an opening goal. As the half progressed, Coventry regrouped and began to find their feet, but Sunderland had good reason to be satisfied with their performance by the time the interval arrived. Granted, there was the odd comedic throwback to the previous season’s travails – the sight of two Sunderland defenders challenging each other for the ball and neither of them actually winning it acted as a swift reminder for anyone who thought that the horrors of the previous season had been forgotten.

If they could sustain their momentum in the second period, a point or perhaps all three were surely there for the taking, and indeed it was Sunderland who opened the scoring in the 52^nd minute. While he had been goal-shy in the Premiership, Daryl Murphy had gone on a pre-season spree against lower league opposition and his run continued as he stabbed the ball home from six yards out after Coventry failed to clear a corner. A blatant handball was missed or deliberately ignored by the referee and Elliott cleverly hooked it into the danger area where it fell to Murphy to get Sunderland off the mark for the new season.

Now was the time to take hold of the game – to be strong and press for a second goal while remaining diligent in defence. Unfortunately, it never happened. Coventry knew an equaliser was there for the taking if they continued in stick to the tactics with which they had ended the first half. Sunderland’s players began to visibly wilt and it wasn’t just down to the heat. The team that had performed so catastrophically on the field throughout the previous season had required leadership and direction for far longer than the fortnight or so that Quinn had allowed himself and Bobby Saxton to mould the team into their desired shape.

The inevitable equaliser came in the 71^st minute with the strong, purposeful Stern John receiving the ball with his back to goal, turning away from Kenny Cunningham and working an angle before lofting it into the far corner beyond Ben Alnwick’s reach. It was a rare moment of genuine quality in the match and it sealed Sunderland’s fate. By now the Black Cats were bereft of ideas as well as belief and it was a case of when rather than if Coventry would finish the job off.

The winning goal was so riddled with defensive incompetence that a DVD of it would belong on a coaching course; to show how not to react to a set-piece. Conceding a foul on the left hand touchline, Sunderland’s players began trotting amiably into their positions as Coventry tried to exploit the situation with a quick free kick, releasing Gary McSheffrey unmarked into the penalty box. Fortunately, referee Chris Foy whistled to allow himself to catch up with play before the Sky Blues retook the kick. They did this in exactly the same way again, Sunderland still seemingly oblivious to the impending threat as McSheffrey was allowed to ghost into the box unchallenged and drill a deflected shot through a gang of jelly-legged “defenders.”

So one game gone and one defeat, but at least Sunderland’s failings were there for all to see. Quinn described Coventry’s winner as a “giveaway goal”, calling it, “a little glitch that's in there that I've got to get out very, very quickly. It's intelligence and it's professionalism and we have to get it sorted.” Whether they could iron out that glitch in time for the arrival at the Stadium Of Light from promotion favourites Birmingham City would remain to be seen.

BOOK AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW!

The Irish Uprising - Now Available To Order

Suppose I should get on and actually write the thing...

Excerpt from Chapter One... The Arrival Of Roy Keane

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of The Irish Uprising, looking at the arrival at SAFC of the (latest) managerial messiah, Roy Keane...

The expression on the face of Sky Sports' assured but disturbingly hairy-pawed anchorman Richard Keys shifted from the matter in hand. For now, all talk of the playful first-half mauling that Manchester United had just dealt out to a spineless Charlton Athletic side was to be momentarily forgotten. This was breaking news, something else from somewhere else, maybe a world-changing event. Famously, back in 1980, it was a sports presenter who told the American viewing public the shocking news of John Lennon's assassination, and now it looked as though Keys was on the brink of delivering a similarly earth-shattering thunderbolt. Had the Queen abdicated from the throne? Was the war on terror finally over? Perhaps Alan Shearer had choked to death on a cashew nut?

No, this was more, something in an entirely different stratosphere. The viewing audience, consisting mostly of fans of Manchester United and Charlton Athletic with the addition of those who had nothing better to do on a Wednesday evening in late August, closed their eyes with a mixture of fear and anticipation. And thus, Richard Keys did speak. And as he spoke a smile spread across his lips as he revealed that 'The new Sunderland manager is… it's Roy Keane.'

Eh? Keane? What the hell…?

In the subsequent hours the mobile phone network in and around Wearside practically buckled under the weight of thousands of text messages and garbled, gibbering phone calls as fans spread the incredible news; incredible for two reasons. Firstly, the idea that someone as synonymous with success as Roy Keane was prepared to launch his managerial career with a club in such a state of punch-drunk upheaval as Sunderland was at the very least bizarre. It certainly proved that the man hadn't lost his lust for a good battle (or he had a hitherto-unseen pitch-black sense of humour.) What was additionally incredible about the news was that it came less than twenty-four hours after Sunderland's temporary manager Niall Quinn had announced he'd sacked himself (which as club chairman he was perfectly entitled to do), and proclaimed that he would be bringing in a 'world class manager'. At that point in time the term 'world class' applied to men like Fabio Capello or Frank Rijkaard – but it was now emerging that Sunderland's new world-class manager would be someone who… well, someone who hadn't actually managed at any level. At all.

There was no doubting that Keane had been a world-class player and a dominant personality in a Manchester United dressing room where he hoovered up winners' medals, but managing at the very top of the game was very much not on his CV. Lifting trophies, excelling in the dispensing of on-field punishment, causing outrage in Irish society, those boxes had all been well and truly ticked, but not the one that boasted world class managerial achievements.

But after all, it must be remembered that this is Sunderland Association Football Club, a club with an unerringly loyal support and enormous untapped potential. But also a club which has an uncanny knack of finding a cack-handed way of snatching catastrophe from the jaws of victory whenever possible and providing non-SAFC fans with countless moments of high comedy. This was the club who in the space of three years set the unwanted record of registering the lowest ever points total in the Premiership (a feeble, lily-livered nineteen) only to fecklessly smash that record at the very next attempt (an eye-watering and scarcely-believable fifteen). A club with a nearly-new stadium capable of holding almost fifty-thousand fans that had driven away most of its fan base through a series of unambitious and often downright clueless policy decisions. In fact, the only good thing about visiting the Stadium Of Light by the spring of 2006 was that you didn't have to queue all that long for your half-time pint.