My First Sunderland Match: “The Saturday That Started Everything”
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Saturday 3 March 1973 — my first visit to Roker Park.
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It was sandwiched between the legendary FA Cup fifth round replay win over Manchester City and the double-header with Luton Town, the latter being a victory in the FA Cup quarters. I begged my Dad to let me go to the home game versus Oxford United. It was a routine Second Division league fixture but Sunderland was on the rise.
I was thirteen years old and incredibly (by today’s standards), I travelled on my own — well, with all the lads from the villages. My Dad said, “Stick with the lads, son. They’ll see you right”. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant but I followed his advice and it served me well.
My transport was one of the Roberts coaches that threaded their way through the villages of south east County Durham, collecting Sunderland supporters as they went. Every stop added another group of “the big lads” — some I recognised, some I didn’t. By the time we’d reached Sunderland, the coach wasn’t simply full: it had become a travelling supporters’ branch.
I realised we had to be in Sunderland early so the lads could get a belly full. First stop, The Victory Club. Would there ever be a day when I could enter that mysterious pre-match pleasure palace?
We parked well away from Roker Park and I made my way to the ground, arriving around one o’clock. Kick off was still two hours away, but I wasn’t about to risk missing a single second of my first pilgrimage. Then, through the turnstile I went and there it was…the Fulwell End.
My God! Massive didn’t really do it justice.To a boy of thirteen, it wasn’t a football terrace — it was a red and white cliff face. Thousands of supporters swayed together like wheat in a coastal wind, every chant rolling from one end of the stand to the other before crashing back again. It breathed. It roared. It was alive.
The colours were vivid. Brighter than television ever suggested. The grass looked greener. The shirts looked redder. The smells were stronger too. Some were great…some not so!
Lots of fans were buying a programme, so I followed the lead, making the pocket money pennies stretch just about far enough. It turned out that it was an essential; a sort of Google of the day.
I read every page, lapped it up, hungry for information. I also bought a Bovril. Lots of people were doing this. So I followed suit and as Barry White sang a year later, “It was my first, my last…”
My memory insists it was a bright, sunny afternoon.
I’ve tried to research and confirm this but cannot. So let nostalgia state that it was. The match has blurred around the edges. Incredibly, it’s over fifty three years ago but the feelings remain as if it was only yesterday. The crowd grew and grew until there was barely space for anyone else.
The sound and the noise increased. Every player had their own intro….. “Hey Dick Malone”, “Dennis, Dennis Tueart on the wing, on the wing”, “Vic Halom, Vic Halom, Vic Halom la-la-la-la-la-la”. A Spotify playlist from the Fulwell End, calling their heroes to action.
And I remember the tension — not in the players but in my own young legs.
For ninety minutes, I discovered that football could make your muscles ache without you taking a single step. Standing there, playing every ball. Every attack, every bit of defending tightened an invisible spring.
Then Sunderland scored and I’d never heard anything remotely like it. The roar didn’t arrive through my ears — it hit me square in the chest. Then I was lost in a crazy dance. Thousands of strangers became one enormous wave, celebrating together in a joyous explosion that lasted only seconds but has stayed in my memory ever since.
Eventually, the final whistle blew. A 1-0 win and the songs rang out once more, loud and proud, boldly proclaiming that we’d win both the League and the Cup. Positivity volume turned up to eleven.
Football didn’t end at five o’clock in those days.
It continued in strict order and back on the coach, there was hushed silence as James Alexander Gordon read the classified results, every score delivered with an intonation that made you anticipate the final score. If you wanted to know how all the teams in the English and Scottish Leagues fared, this was the earliest chance. The Football Pink would quickly provide the full Sunderland match report later.
With a good run back, it was Saturday night telly — things like Dr Who, The Generation Game, The Two Ronnies, Parkinson and Match of the Day. Then came Hammer House of Horror before the national anthem and closedown. Or am I making it up?
Looking back, that first afternoon gripped me in a way that I’d had hoped for. Players became heroes and many years later, I met two such heroes — Billy Hughes and Bobby Kerr — at the Stadium of Light. I was in awe.
Hughes was as brash as when he played; Kerr was warm, generous and exactly the captain I’d imagined all those years before.
And then there was Vic Halom. My all-time favourite Sunderland player. The warrior I watched that afternoon from the Fulwell End, never imagining that one day, I’d shake his hand.
Football has a wonderful sense of humour because when I eventually met Vic, it wasn’t in a hospitality suite or at a sportsman’s dinner — it was at an ice cream van outside Wembley. He’d ordered a 99. Of course he had. Some memories are simply too perfect to edit. And, if it was good enough for Vic, it was good enough for me. “A 99, please!”
Looking back now, I realise Sunderland didn’t simply win 1-0 against Oxford that afternoon. Instead, a football club quietly took up residence inside a thirteen-year-old boy.
It unpacked its bags and made itself comfortable, and more than half a century later, it shows no sign whatsoever of moving out.