Sunday Morning
My main concern about this match was whether it would be on but the overnight snowfall was nothing to shout about and it’s all looking good now at 11am. West Ham’s form has been dire recently and we really should win this one; that’s the worrying part. It looks like Carlos is going to play for at least some of the game and the more crosses I see going in for Cisse and Kenwyne, the happier I’ll be. Fulop should play again while Chimbonda’s role in the switching on of the Christmas lights points to him returning to favour. The Hammers kept a clean sheet last week for the first time in months and I’m sure they won’t manage it for two weeks in a row. I travelled up on a Grand Central train yesterday and the little lad opposite me assured me that West Ham would win but my prediction is 3-1 to us.

Aftermath
As I headed up to the Chesters in the freezing rain after the match I saw a young seagull splattered into the road outside of The Derry and this seemed emblematic of my hopes for this season. I was right about one thing in my pre-match prediction, but unfortunately we never really looked like getting one goal, let alone three. For the first five minutes or so we were looking positive but as soon as West Ham got a few breaks together they looked dangerous to me while the more we attacked, the less we looked like scoring. Kenwyne still looked well below par, though he was a bit better in the second half but neither he nor Cisse got much change out of the West Ham defence, who consistently out-jumped them.

Given that I and the rest of the Sunderland faithful could see that this tactic wasn’t working at all, I wonder why we persisted with it instead of playing more balls along the ground. Pop Robson came on for the half-time draw and I wish he’d stayed on as he would surely have been sharper than our attackers. We had a very good penalty shout in the first half when Cisse was brought down but the ref wasn’t exactly being in a generous mood towards us, though we can hardly use this as an excuse today. There were countless misplaced passes, misplaced headers and misplaced shots, and that’s not acceptable.

We were lucky not to go 2-0 down near the end of the first-half when Ferdinand lost the ball in the centre and they broke dangerously, only for Fulop to force them wide and a follow-up shot hit the bar. On a day of few positives, Reid made a lot of good runs down the left before crossing for Cisse, while Carlos looked fine when he came on as sub. Well, my batteries are running low, my brother’s arrived and I don’t want to prolong the agony so I’ll sign off now.

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