It is almost like the old days at Salut! Sunderland. The rebirth is very much a one-off but feels good while it’s lasting.
Salut!’s football offshoot was a fan site that found an audience way beyond one club’s already large fan base. By engaging with supporters of other clubs, usually via their own unofficial forums and blogs, we became quite well known and often respected far from Wearside.
Sadly, recurring technical problems and the expense of fixing them led to the site facing closure towards the end of 2019. Someone paid £500 – not quite enough to cover all those costs and others – to keep it live and assured the old codgers running Salut! Sunderland their beloved site was safe in fresh hands. A new editorial team was raring to go; great things were confidently expected.
What went wrong i have no idea. But after a desultory run of articles – just 16, on my count, between Jan 1 2020 and May 4 2020 – the successor site simply fell silent, save for some basic updates of the season-by-season stats. Most of the new content that had appeared covered aspects of the Sunderland women’s team and their opponents which, commendable as it was, seemed a pathetically weak way of keeping the flag flying. We had, in any case, published loads about the Lasses, too.
We burst back into life at the end of last week, reproducing here extracts from a Queens Park Rangers fan site’s very long and extremely funny report of a match that ended QPR 0-3 Sunderland. “A masterpiece,” was the verdict at the surviving Salut! Sunderland Facebook groupfrom Paul Dobson, himself a anzine editor (Sunderland’s excellent A Love Supreme).
I alerted Loft For Wordsthe QPR site concerned, to what I had done and the response has been phenomenal. When I last looked, more than 2,000 Rangers fans had seen my post.
What follows is an encouraging series of messages left by a few or them (starting with my explanation). Thanks to all of them and to Clive Whittingham, who runs Loft For Words, for consenting to the extracts being published here in the first place.