We all love the FA Cup, don’t we? It brings tears of joy and sadness in equal measures because you cannot predict what is going to happen. I mean you can go into a FA Cup tie as red-hot favourites to win against a lower ranked opponent and then perform so abysmally that you get defeated, sometimes on your patch.
Being a Championship side, you start your FA Cup journey in the Third Round like the Premier League guys, a far cry from the days recently when we had to start in the First-Round proper as a League One side. Being a Cup competition, you cannot expect who to get as Premier League sides can face each other as often as playing someone non-league.
Today (Sunday), we saw our Third-Round opponent, and what a draw…
For those who were out for the day and weren’t tuning in, we got a home draw which is good. The interesting part came in the shape of the opponent, we got a Premier League side. However, not just any old Premier League side but those barcodes from up the A19. Welcome back to Sunderland, Cartoon Army! If that doesn’t get the pulses flowing on Wearside or anywhere where you breed support for the Lads, then what does do eh? It’s certainly whetted my personal appetite even though I won’t be physically in attendance. Any Wear-Tyne or Tyne-Wear derby is an atmosphere to absorb. For the lads themselves, this is a huge chance to show that they are just as good as their highly ranked neighbours if not better. If I was a player, this is one fixture I wouldn’t need any building up for whatsoever.
The fixture has been played 155 times so far with both SAFC and NUFC holding 53 wins each, whilst there has been 49 draws. The astonishing fact is that there has been only 7 FA Cup games between the two rivals, and we have to go back to the Sixth Round stage in 1956 for the last one. In the barcodes side that day included Jackie Milburn and Lads managerial legend Bob Stokoe. Meanwhile, we had the legendary Len Shackleton, Stan Anderson and Billy Bingham featuring for us. Goals late in both the first and second halves from Bill Holden silenced the majority of the 61300 crowd and booked a semi-final place for the Lads where we would lose 3-0 at Hillsborough to Birmingham City. Now it’s time to end their Cup campaign right, eh?
If recent form in the fixture has anything to go, the Lads should be the winners. After all, the barcodes last win against us in a match was the day before my 39th birthday at Sid James Park and none of us want a repeat that scoreline do we? But the bookies being the bookies, will have already installed the barcodes as favourites and just because of their Premier League standing and financial clout which their fans are keen to boast about all the time.
Yet, it meant little when wee Cambridge United travelled to Sid James and came away with a win: those barcode were soon quiet then. So we can’t we repeat the trick on them and send them packing back up the A19 with their tails firmly lodged in between their tails? Remember, it is the Cup and anything can happen. A sell out crowd at the SoL, and probably a live screening on TV, all I can say is as follows:
“HA’ WAY THE LADS! BRING IT ON!”
