.... and so they should. “I like to follow always the teams I have previously played for. I follow Real Madrid a lot, I follow Bolton as well. But Sunderland is a special club for me. Even if I was only there for six months, it feels like I was there a lot longer.” But who ....
Great player, one of my favourites when he was here. There were more than a few of our fans at the time who weren't arsed by him mind. Sad thinking back to that team, simpler times, you just turned up and watched them. You didn't think about a mammoth implosion or dropping down 2 divisions and now.... this. Feeling a bit emotional about that strangely, I didn't think Alonso would be the one to trigger it We have to believe there'll be better days ahead, but I would give quite a lot to maybe go back to Poyet and be able to roll that dice again to see what happened in a parallel universe. There was a foundation there and we gave up on it.
Hes not the only ex player who has been affected in this way by our club and its fans. Its a complete mystery to me that we just cannot get it all to gel together, those great seasons under Reid were the closest we've come to achieving our ambitions which now seems light years away.
It shows about loan players as well. Alonso we should have signed, and Borini we shouldn't. The latter a season later, mind.
Hopefully having a couple of sensible Sunderland fans on the board like David Jones and the other new bloke will stop these no brainer deals from slipping through our fingers. At times it's seemed like nobody at the club has a clue what a good footballer looks like.
Letting Alonso and M’Vila go were heart braking. Players that would fit in our dream time and we just let them slip away. Madness!
2 of the very best we’ve had. Alonso, what I loved about him and I think we all did, was he started poor and got better and better. He never threw the towel in. I know why he loved the club, he used to gasp at the away support and applaud it, he loved to see it. There’s that iconic image of him celebrating at St James that never gets old. The deal should have been done before he went back to Florence, they hadn’t even tracked him and watched him grow. They initially wanted £2 million and some ****ty CB who’s name escapes me. They had him back a week asked for £5million, 2 weeks £7millon as they could see he’d grown. Eyebrows raised all round when it was £29 million to Chelsea but what a player he’s been for them, even if he’s on the slope down now.
Not yet totally convinced by the current regime, but they are an improvement on recent past, hardly a difficult task, to be honest.
Danny Rose is in a different bracket, I think. Spurs wanted a really good whack for him iirc. £8 or 9 million. Or was that Alan Hutton? Evans was one of our best loan players, but I don't think Man U were ever keen on letting him go.