Sunderland’s pre-season mini tour ended up being about as mini as you can make it other by not having any matches at all, when due to Tolka Park being almost all but washed away in rain the likes of which I haven’t seen since god knows when...

The day started off brightly enough. Mark who has been hosting me and Michael in his Belfast gaff was readying himself to apologise to the girlfriend for his decision to spend Friday night sitting watching ‘Have I Got News’ repeats on Channel Dave with the lads instead of trekking over to the ‘other’ side of Belfast to drink wine with her and her friends. However, when she rang Saturday morning, he picked up the phone and she opened with the line that all men love to hear when they think that it’s them in the wrong when she said, ’I’d just like to apologise for last night!’ It was one of the first good result of the day.

Having spent the morning, or what little we saw of it, watching the Olympic rowing and listening to Hazel Irvine’s banal commentaries we headed off to Dublin in bright sunshine with not a drop of rain to be seen. An hour fifty later and E1.60 lighter thanks to the toll fee and into Dublin we rolled and pinged the ground within minutes thanks to some quality map reading from your truly.

I hadn’t been to Tolka Park since about two-dozen of us hardy Mackems saw us play Shelbourne there in pre season match in 1997. That evening, some little bloke who’d just signed played up front, name of Phillips, who I thought at the time might get us twelve goals a season if we were lucky. Eleven years on and it was no surprise to hear news filtering through that he was the difference between his new side Birmingham and a Greg Halford inspired (?) Sheffield United. Let’s hope Tony ‘yeah but we were much better than you anyway’ Mowbray regrets that unfathomable piece of close season business come Saturday.

We got parked at the brow of a hill in a little side-street not knowing that that was the second good call of the day and I made a call to the latest light in my life (I won’t name her as understandably she would prefer to remain anonymous, but you know who you are) to see how she was given that I hadn’t gotten my backside into gear to ring her since I flew in on Wednesday. The call ended with the requisite squeaky chants of ‘love you’ from my so called mates. Cheers lads.

We installed ourselves in Fagan’s on Upper Dorset Street and settled down to while a way a few hours drinking, eating, and enjoying the craic. As we sat there watching the world go by, the Armagh fans who seen their beloved team beaten in the quarter finals of the All Ireland Football Championships at Croke Park which was all of 500 yards from Tolka Park trooped in with that look on their faces that few supporters have experienced more than long term Sunderland supporters, that of hope extinguished by disappointment.

But they were good craic and we sat and laughed at the stair-rods coming down outside. Well laugh we did until it slowly started to dawn that it wasn’t going to let up and the match itself may be in jeopardy.

A pint or two later and a meal from the carvery where I asked the obligatory Polish immigrant to shovel on as big a portion she could without losing her job and we sat there enjoying the craic with some of the locals. I hadn’t felt so full since well, Wednesday night when I stuffed myself almost to bursting point at Thymes Restaurant on the corner of Strand and Bridge street in Athlone, highly recommended by the way.

One of the friendly Shamrock Rover’s fans we got chatting to confirmed our worst fears that the game indeed was off and then quickly handed me a Rovers lapel badge in some much appreciated if futile attempt to diminish my disappointment of travelling such a long way for no reason. The badge was to be the third and last piece of fortune of the day.

We emerged from the pub and couldn’t believe the sight along the street which. Two hours earlier it had been a normal residential street but in the meantime it had morphed in double quick time into something resembling The Serpentine. There were a few very unhappy Irish folk who had left their cars parked up before heading to Croke Park for the Gaelic footy only to come back to find that their investment in a Ford Mondeo rather than a navy amphibious assault vehicle hadn’t turned out to be quite as good a choice as one would have assumed.

The day’s contrast with Friday’s sublime sojourn to the North West coast couldn’t have been much more stark. Once we finally had managed to shake our selves from a lie in we headed up the beautiful north west coastline to many of my favourites spots, Portrush, the harbour at Ballintoy for a rum and raisin ice cream and an ogle at some delightful young ladies and a visit to Mr and Mrs K’s for tea and cakes.

We got back to the car wish we were delighted to find hadn’t floated away due to its fortunately chosen topographical position and we floated out down Dorset Street. With the three of us packed like sardines in Mark’s VW Polo, it was like something out of a Jerome K Jerome book (and no he’s not the lad who plays up front for Birmingham).

I texted ‘er in doors and she had a good laugh at the loser who took the best part of a week off work to go and watch a ‘meaningless friendly’ in another country only to find that the meaningless friendly was even more meaningless than I may have expected.

I can’t bear to give too much of detail of the journey back to Belfast, it may take many hours of therapy to recover, but suffice to say that it took six hours to get from Dublin and Belfast, a journey which would normally take 120 minutes max. The N1 (the only major route towards Belfast) was submerged under about six feet of water and the Garda had us, all of the Armagh fans and anyone else daft enough to be out on the streets of north Dublin crisscrossing every residential estate north of Tolka Park floating from one submerged street to another in a traffic jam the likes of which I haven’t seen outside of Bangkok or Mumbai. Nerves were becoming so frayed at one point, I half expected to see Michael Douglas get out of the car in front armed with semi automatic weapons and looking for revenge.

No doubt a hastily arranged friendly will be slotted in at the Academy in the next day or two but for the meantime, for us its friendlies over, back to the real world and bring on the Scousers. Odds against El ‘Radgey’ Diof scoring against his former employers, about as certain as rain in Ireland methinks.

Line up: Well you may as well have my guesstimate:

Sunderland: Gordon, Chimbonda, Nosworthy, Collins, Liddle, Edwards, Tainio, Reid, Malbranque, Murphy, Diouf

Unused, unused subs: Ward, Fulop, Stokes, Chopra, Miller, Leadbitter

Man of the Match: Definitely not the Dublin Authorities, Highways agency or Garda

 Attendance: 0

Dov

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