There are things you need to accept when you write about football. The first is that you will sometimes be wrong, more often than not in my case. The second is that people will disagree with you. Once you are comfortable with those two inescapable facts it all becomes a bit easier. It’s made easier for ALS writers by the fact that we write about Sunderland; a club all of us care deeply about and our writing is read, obsessed Mags apart, by people like us. The other thing is that not every single Sunderland fan reads what we write so the prospect of raising tension is minimalised.