WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT

Here we go, in West Herrington, on the week of my tenth birthday, April 1957.

“Football, you’ve got to go to the football while you’re here, man”, said my cousin Stanley. “Would you like to go to the football, Johnny?“ took up his dad. Oh yes. So with Uncle Jimmy Gamble it’s to Roker Park on Saturday afternoon. Going through the clicking turnstiles, whose apparatus of great tubular metal bars intrigued, and intimidated – was this something like a prison? Standing on the terraces, very near the front: “Let him through, he’s just a little fella.“

I was jostled down two or three rows so I’m right next to the pitch. I can’t believe how close I am to the grass, or how the ironwork canopies of the great stands rise up so high opposite me. So many spectators, and for me the entirely novel sense of the energy pent in such a vast congregation of people, tens of thousands. And how close I am to the white line defining the edge of the pitch!

I believe that both Billy Bingham and “clown prince” Len Shackleton were in the Sunderland lineup that day, but the only player I recall, who did some wonderful, rapid-darting trickery with the football right in front of me, was Charlie Fleming: “They call him cannonball“ my uncle informs me. “He’s so clever,“ I say to Uncle Jimmy. “He’s a professional, that’s why.“ Oh. I don’t think I know this long word. Perhaps it’s when we get back to Margate the following week that I ask my dad, who didn’t come up north with us, and he tells me that the man is paid to play football. Paid? To play? This is like being paid to eat sweets! I couldn’t credit it.

My much smaller town of Margate had no such team. Our players were part-timers, our nearest professional club was workaday Gillingham 40 miles away, and they were only in Division Three (South). Whereas Sunderland was a famous club, a mighty club, never out of the First Division. By that day in 1957 I believe just one other English football club, Arsenal, had exceeded Sunderland’s six First Division championships. How could I not become a Sunderland supporter? But alas, over the ensuing sixty years or more the club’s letdowns have nearly always outweighed its triumphs. Yet c’mon, now 78, I can’t give up now, can I?