Reader’s Corner: Sunderland’s Rise Has Bred Renewed Belief!

Sunderland presents a prematch show during the Sky Bet Championship Play Off Semi Final Second Leg match between Sunderland and Coventry City at the Stadium Of Light in Sunderland, England, on May 13, 2025. (Photo by Scott Llewellyn/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images) | NurPhoto via Getty Images I became a Sunderland supporter in the early 1970s — although “became” probably isn’t the right word. As a young lad in Hebburn, football wasn’t something you ‘chose’ in the modern sense.

It was in the streets, in the schoolyard, in the voices coming through the kitchen wireless, in the conversations of men leaning on bar counters with rolled-up sleeves and pints of beer. Sunderland simply arrived in your bloodstream. And what an arrival it was.

The FA Cup final of 1973 gave us all something impossible to believe in. We were Second Division underdogs facing the mighty Leeds United, one of the finest sides in Europe. Yet there we were, watching Ian Porterfield score, watching Jim Montgomery somehow save twice in the same movement, and watching Sunderland lift the cup as if the world had briefly tilted on its axis.

At thirteen, you don’t understand history, economics or probability. You only know the feeling in your chest — and I remember thinking this was how life would always feel, but of course, it wasn’t. Supporting Sunderland teaches you early that joy and suffering aren’t opposites but companions, and the years that followed became a long education in hope.