On this day in 1998, Sunderland destroyed Rotherham 5-1 in the FA Cup Third Round. Notably, Kevin Phillips scored four of our five goals. Here's a Sobs' match report written at the time of the game.
TallPaul had been desperate to give Rotherham a try for some reason, so we hopped on the Durham bus and headed down the A1. Rather than head into town, as we’d heard it was a bit scruffy, we decided just to walk up the road from the ground and try that. There were several places that passed for pubs, but we picked what the landlord happily described as the roughest pub in town. He admitted it got wrecked every Friday night “...but they’re all related, so they come back first thing and fix it up again,” was his reasoning for accepting the situation. Who were we to argue, so we popped out ten pence in the pool table and set about enjoying ourselves. While the beer was strictly of “matchday only” quality, it was remarkably cheap, and thankfully there were none of the locals who made the place so rough in that day. In fact, I don’t remember a pub in the proximity of a football ground being so quiet on a matchday. Apart from ourselves, there were two miserable looking old lads at the bar, smoking Woodbines, and seeing who could pull their flat cap the closest to their eyes, without uttering a word for the whole of our stay. After our fourth game, a lad of about twelve wandered in carrying a pool cue in a case, and dropped his ten pence on the edge of the table. Ah, we thought, the local hustler trying to win some money for sweets. Cool as you like, he popped another ten pence in the machine on the wall that dispensed mints in a plastic container