Salut! Sunderland 2

Salut?, SuperKev and Birmingham City: the correspondence

Here is the e-mail exchange that passed between Salut! Sunderland and Birmingham City's press office concerning our request for the briefest of e-mail interviews with Kevin Phillips:

Sept 13 2008. Salut! Sunderland to club

Hello (sorry, but I do not have the press/media officer's name),

I am a British journalist working in Abu Dhabi, where I have been helping to launch the new English language daily, The National, but also run - as a labour of love - my own small Sunderland AFC-related website at http://salutsunderland.com
I am a huge admirer of Kevin Phillips and will always look on him as one of the Sunderland players to have given me most pleasure in what is now approaching half a century as a supporter.
My request is simple, and I'd greatly appreciate if you could at least run it by him: would he be willing to do a very quick Q&A interview by e-mail (phone is fine by me but e-mail may be more appropriate given the distance/time difference) which I could publish a few days before either the Aston Villa v Sunderland game (Sept 27) or the Sunderland v Arsenal tie a week later.
I would supply the 10 questions and he could answer in whatever fashion and at whatever length he chose. There would naturally be nothing inflammatory about the nature of any of the questions.
The choice of games relates 1) to another of his clubs (Villa) and 2) to the team he supported as a boy (Arsenal).
I hope you and he will feel that this is something he could do. I would be happy to make a nominal donation to a charity of his choice (the site does not make money, but its costs are offset slightly by advertising, which I have just started to attract, and I could reserve say one month's income from that, 50 euros, for such a purpose).
Thanks for your attention and good luck for the season ahead.
Regards
Colin Randall

Oct 1/2: Phone call to Birmingham City press office confirms receipt of the e-mail. Someone says that although it is now too late for the games mentioned, the request will be considered for appropriate fixtures later in the season. She does not offer great encouragement that the answer will be Yes.

Oct 3 2008. Club to Salut! Sunderland

Hi Colin,

Great to hear from you, and I hope all is going well for you out there.Unfortunately we will not be able to grant you a Kevin Phillips interview as we have a policy of retaining the players’ services for official club mediums first and foremost and then other media requests. Sadly we are not able to accommodate requests from fans’ sites.I do hope you understand and am sorry we’re unable to help on this occasion.

Kind regards,

Chris</em>

Oct 3. Salut! Sunderland to club:

Club policy is club policy and no hard feelings. But it never fails to astonish me how clubs are perfectly happy to take a great deal from fans without always giving an awful lot back; my own club blithely took and used a full page, professionally written - and free! -  feature for a matchday programme and only then said it would deny me even a tiny footnote linking to my site, something a fans' site/fanzine would never dream of doing.I suppose one way of looking at it is to see the gap between club and supporters (all supporters) getting wider. The very minor tragedy - ok, that's too strong, disappointing aspect is better - of the Kevin Phillips one is that he knows how much he is still revered by the vast majority of fans for what he achieved at Sunderland, and would probably have been quite willing to take what, 15 minutes to answer 10 questions.

But I say all that without any personal rancour and appreciate your courteous reply.

best

colin

Club versus country: an easy home win

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Welcome to an overspill site for Salut! Sunderland, a place to put longer files that some but not all people may wish to see. In addition, where the Who Are They? feature includes more than one article, the "overmatter" will - in time - have a link to here from the sub-category list in the main site's sidebar. The following is a very long - chapter length - expansion of my oft-argued reasons for placing passion for my football club some miles ahead of anything I feel for the national side. It was written for the Sunderand fanzine A Love Supreme's book More 24 Hour SAFC People, published in late 2007 and my share of the proceeds has been donated to charity

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Looking back, it was as golden an opportunity as Daniel Dichio's sitter in the Wembley playoff final against Charlton, or indeed the chance of his at Upton Park that would, if converted, have put us top of the Premiership. And I missed mine just as glaringly as Danny had missed his.

 

In one of the love letters that passed between us long ago, Joelle, then my wife-to-be, wrote that she could think of only one fault in me that she would change. I smoked too much. She might have added others: permanently broke, holes in my socks and underpants, coming from Shildon, being lousy at her native language, French. She has certainly added plenty since and while the French has improved, there isn't much I can do about coming from Shildon. But back then, it was the fags that concerned her. If only I would cut down, she wrote to me from Le Mans, her home town, she would in return do anything I asked of her.

 

Talk about open goals. There it was, my cue to secure a lifetime of pass-outs to watch Sunderland !

Bush whacked

Whatever else he has to answer for around the world, President George W Bush has surely now gone too far.

Thousands of miles from my home, even more thousands from his, he stopped me watching the Lads win.