Sunderland's Shock Collapse: Heartbreaking Loss to Stoke in 1987
Lawrie McMenemy’s Sunderland hit the buffers at Stoke’s Victoria Ground, losing 3–0 to end their last glowing embers of hope for promotion back to the top flight.
When I started researching this date in history, I had to do a double-take at the newspaper headlines suggesting that, up to that point, the 1986–87 season had been anything but miserable. It is seared in my brain as one of the most utterly depressing, gut-wrenching seasons ever following the Lads. But studying the stats and the tables, I was surprised to see that yes, indeed, as far into the season as mid-March, we were still in with a chance to return to the top flight.
Before this game, we had taken 39 points out of a possible 87. Not far off 2 points per game. After this defeat, we earned only 9 points from the remaining 13 matches, out of a possible 39.
It looks as though the whole squad must have bought into the theory that this was indeed a must-win game to get ourselves into the promotion push. What no one seems to have told them was that downing tools altogether was only drawing the wide jaws of relegation ever closer. Our demise came on a cold, wet, miserable Tuesday night at Stoke (you couldn’t make it up!
). In what were described as almost monsoon conditions, the team was washed away, both figuratively and meteorologically. Indeed, only half an hour before kick-off, it had seemed highly unlikely that the game would go ahead at all.
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