La Révolution WILL be televised!
10/31/2024 02:00 AM
It used to be that hosting Oxford United at home was a crushing indictment of how far Sunderland had fallen. Last weekend it became a signal of intent.
For years, trapped in the mire of League One, the hosting of teams like Oxford was purgatory — a damning reminder of how years of negligence and mismanagement had finally come home to roost in the most rancid of ways. Fixtures like Saturday's were once decidedly unpalatable, even despite Sunderland's solid record against the U's.
Everything about those fixtures, both home and away, stood out for all the wrong reasons. The humour of using Transit vans as makeshift stands in the club car park aside, these games symbolised exactly where we didn't want Sunderland to be.
If the years spent languishing in League One, playing fixtures like this, were deemed unpalatable, then Saturday's game was something so delicious it both satiated us in the short term and left us begging for more in the long run.
Saturday's match was even more than that, made all the more striking because it danced on the line between two realities — where the performance and, by extension, our season, has been both typically Sunderland and so unlike Sunderland in equal measure.
The years that led to our descent into League One and the time spent languishing there — the mismanagement, rank unprofessionalism, and a raft of other repugnant traits — have lodged so deeply in our memory that to start a season as we have feels like an ethereal experience. A rot so deeply rooted in the club that for it to now flourish seems both intangible and unfathomable, leaving us pinching ourselves as we reaffirm our ascent with a 5-point lead and the top scorer position in League football.
Those haunting memories have been cast aside, at least for now.
This is a new Sunderland. Saturday was the culmination of patience, hard work, and meticulousness. Everything about it displayed what we have become and where we aim to be. The 2-0 win alone doesn't shout from the rooftops, but contextualised by two battling victories away against teams that pride themselves on their home form, it creates a wider, more impressive context to Saturday's success.
Too many times we would have undone a week of hard work with a subpar performance, succumbing either to our own exhaustion or to shithousery of the highest order. But Saturday saw a side showing professionalism and ruthlessness far beyond its tender years.
This was a side that used tact and guile as effectively as it had used blood and thunder mere days before.
This, then, has become a Sunderland side specifically designed to be as far removed from its old self as possible. Age has been replaced by youth; a club where you could wind down your career has become one that can kickstart it.
As we knocked the ball around the Oxford side at will, the penny dropped that this is a "piss-taking party" none of us want to see brought to a halt any time soon.
Getting here has been no fluke; it has been designed and overseen despite a summer brimming with concerns, but this feels like it may just be the beginning.
Yes, we have ridden our luck at times, but every team will experience the ebbs and flows of Lady Luck over a season — an inescapable fact for even the most special of sides.
For now, we need to enjoy this modernised Sunderland. Saturday wasn't our arrival, nor was this week, but if it wasn't our arrival, it was certainly a statement — a statement of intent, belief, and ambition. Ambitions that, while sometimes obscured by Louis-Dreyfus' reluctance to reveal all to the media, now shine brightly under the deserved spotlight.
There is little irony lost that if playing Oxford United at home once symbolised our downfall, it has now become a fixture by which we can measure how far we have come and how much further we're willing to go.
