The perfect moment among the misery showed us what is really happening at Sunderland

Why Sunderland didn't emerge from disappointing Swansea game with nothing.

In many ways – most ways, in fact – the home defeat to Swansea was one of the most unremarkable afternoons I have spent watching Sunderland.

The referee probably, in my opinion at least, was right to send off Luke O’Nien in the 18th minute, although his failure to give a clear penalty for a foul on Amad Diallo just seconds earlier, and the slew of appalling decisions that followed in the game, is beyond my understanding.

Regardless, the game has gone, but because of those two key decisions from the referee it was never going to be much of a contest. While I turned up expecting to see a proper game of football between two sides, it was never allowed to become one.

That’s just football, I guess. It happens. Why it always seemingly has to happen on freezing cold days, though, I have no idea.

There was, though, one brief moment that I won’t be forgetting for a long time.

Sunderland fans have suffered. We all know that. Everyone else kind of knows it, but they don’t know the true extent of it. While the press spit their outrage whenever the likes of Newcastle or Everton fans drop into a Premier League relegation scrap, often to the extent of the local press putting it across their front pages in protest, few journalists, both national and local, felt the need to speak out against what Sunderland fans were forced to endure.

That is another topic for another day, but the point is that things have been incredibly tough for a number of years now.

Like most, I reached the point where I was going to the games out of habit and pure stubbornness more than anything else. That goes back long before the League One days too. It was just something I’d always done, but it was hard to get myself up for a game when hope was hard to come by, never mind expectation.

Judging by people who sat around me at the Stadium of Light, they all felt the same.

Before Niall Quinn’s takeover in 2006, he said Sunderland fans ‘turned up and sat on their backsides waiting to lose,’ and it had reached that stage again, certainly in the couple of years after Sam Allardyce left the club.

In the four years in League one, Covid restrictions permitting, that changed slightly to sitting on our backsides waiting to be disappointed and annoyed.

One of the real highlights of 2022, though, was the emergence of a sense that the connection and trust between supporters and club that had been so painfully eroded was returning. It was hard-earned, but that just made it feel a bit sweeter. While we used to come and watch a team who looked like ours yet bore no resemblance to anything we wanted it to be, we were slowly once again able to recognise and reclaim our club.

You get a good feel for that when things are going well and you’re winning games, but it doesn’t really strike you until days like the Swansea one.

When Dan Neil scored the equaliser to, albeit briefly, put Sunderland on level terms, the atmosphere within the ground was something genuinely special.

I think most people thought it still probably wouldn’t matter to the result, as it proved, but it didn’t matter. It was raw defiance and pride at a club restored, fighting and scrapping against the odds for something worth having, even just for a fleeting moment.

I am not sure that by that point there was a Sunderland fan in the ground, or watching around the world, who believed Sunderland had been given a fair and fighting chance to win that match.

Wave away our blatant penalties then send a Sunderland player off, give them a man advantage, allow Sunderland players to be fouled whilst awarding the opposition free kicks all over the pitch for very little, stack everything you want against Sunderland if you must, and we’ll take the lot of you on – even in a lost cause.

That, right there, is the precious ‘identity’ that so many Sunderland managers have been chasing for so long, and in that moment when Dan Neil scored, you could feel it resonating around the Stadium of light again.

There were some people around us, quite a lot of them, people who have sat in the same seat for years during the dark decline, who we’d never seen animated at all at the game, yet they were on their feet, arms in the air singing their hearts out.

And it wasn’t hope or expectation or anything like that which had gripped them, it was something much simpler: Pride. It was sheer pride in the gutsy defiance of THEIR club.

That moment among the misery told us a lot more about where Sunderland are right now, and hopefully where it’s going, than a win would have. 

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