Thank You, Paddy: Sunderland Hero Gave Us Special Memories

Paddy Roberts came to Sunderland on loan from Manchester City in the January transfer window of 2022. After all the rubbish we had seen in those bleak League One years, Paddy was a breath of fresh air, blowing left-backs out of the water with his mazy run trickery; taking the rather exotic number 77 jersey. Who was this wizard who could do all this but yet couldn’t get into the City team? Then we realised we were two tiers below his parent club, Citeh!

He scored his first goal for us in a 2-0 win over Crewe in March and didn’t score again until he took us to Wembley with an injury-time goal at Sheffield Wednesday in the League One play-off semi-final second leg.

I always thought that Roberts and Jack Clarke’s journeys were similar. Both arrived on loan from Premier League clubs and played on the wing, one on each side. After all the dross we had watched, finally we had two tricky wingers causing chaos on either side.

Both players’ loans were made permanent in the summer of 2022 and then Amad Diallo arrived from Manchester United. One of them in jeans who were presented to the crowd before the Rotherham game at the end of the summer transfer window that year. Clarke had one of his best games in a Sunderland shirt that night assisting two goals for Ross Stewart and scoring a mazy dribbly one himself. That was Tony Mowbray’s first game in charge where he took the shackles off the players and told them to go and enjoy themselves.

And boy, did they?

Roberts and Amad formed an intuitive relationship down the right wing and both scored sumptuous goals. One which sticks in my mind was his equalising goal against Watford then managed by Chris Wilder. He grabbed it on the corner of the penalty area at the North Stand end and curved it into the back of the net. Cue pandemonium.

Roberts’s other stand-out moment was his reverse pass to Eliezer Mayenda in the play-off final last summer, which hauled us back on terms.

Roberts could be frustrating and didn’t always graft as much as we would have liked, but he formed a defining part of Sunderland’s history and goes to Birmingham with our best wishes and fondest memories.