“This is what a derby is — memories passed from one generation to the next”, writes Michael Dunne.
My first ever Sunderland game was on 24 February 2002 — a Wear-Tyne Derby.
This was the first game my father brought me to and I recall the build up like it happened yesterday. The face paint, putting on my Sunderland jersey with “Phillips” on the back (because the club shop had run out of the numbers 1 and 0!) and the increasing sense of trepidation and anticipation as the kick off time approached.
We lost that game 0-1 due to the magnificent performance of Shay Given in the Newcastle goal, and it crushed me as an Irish goalkeeper destroyed a little eight year old Irish boy’s dreams on his first trip to Sunderland.
The heartbreak didn’t last too long, as like the resilient Sunderland fan I’ve become, you learn to grudgingly accept defeat and chase that next high; the next opportunity to roar, to celebrate a goal and to hug the ones close to you when these moments occur.
As some may already know, I’m not from the area nor the country, but my passion for this club goes back to the beginning of my supporting days back in 2002.
It was the way the people made me feel on my first trip with the Irish Sunderland Supporters Club, as it was then. How the Belfast branch dressed me up for the occasion with their face paint and scarves, and how I would readily begin a conversation with anyone in the city who would talk Sunderland AFC with me.
The Sunderland AFC I knew back then was lost along the way — through chaos, decline and ridicule — but it’s fought its way back to become something we can believe in again.
Today, my father and I will fly from Dublin to see our team take on their greatest enemy almost twenty five years on from that trip, and we’ll be there with immense pride in where Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, Kristjaan Speakman and Régis Le Bris have brought the club in such a short space of time.
For years, this club has been the butt of a joke, the laughing stock of the football community and Netflix’s black comedy success story, but that Sunderland is well and truly gone.
In many ways, this edition of the derby is an opportunity for the players but especially the fans to announce that we aren’t the jokers anymore. It’s another opportunity for this club to show that it belongs here and to seize the moment and the occasion.
We’re a proud fanbase but we’re also a fanbase that’ll back our players to the hilt once we see the effort on the pitch. Today, we must match the effort on the pitch with noise that’ll rattle in the stands and that a young kid will remember for a lifetime — just like I did twenty five years ago.
Despite my confident prediction that we’ll win, today is another chapter on the new story of Sunderland AFC. It could be the day that a new generation of fans will be hooked by this incredible football club, and it’s a day to make new memories.
Long after the result is forgotten, it won’t be the scoreline that remains.
Instead, it’ll be the walk to the ground, the nervous laughter, the roar that shakes your chest, and the arms you find yourself wrapped in when the ball hits the Newcastle net. This is what a derby is — memories passed from one generation to the next. And today, once again, we go to make another one.
Haway the Lads!
Category: General Sports
