The King’s Arms perches on the south bank of the Wear behind the waste ground where the Vaux brewery used to be. It’s a proper pub, at least 150 years old, with a fine range of beers, ancient octagonal tables and draughty toilets widely rumoured to be haunted. We always go there before the home game nearest to Christmas. Nothing much changes. You notice the odd dad who isn’t there any more, the odd kid who’s joined the group, but essentially it’s the same group of blokes catching up, having much the same conversation they have every year. Except this season, there was something different. This season there was a parrot.
I’m not sure anybody had realised the King’s needed a parrot but now it’s there it’s obvious it belongs. This is a pub that reeks of the docks and the shipyards and the city’s seafaring heritage. Of course it should have a parrot. And so Peter now sits on top of his cage, cynical and grey, brutally assessing the drinkers in his domain.
The previous home game, I was told, Peter had attacked a bald man. “Why divvin yer put it inside the cage?” he’d asked the barmaid as he dabbed at the wound. “Look,” she’d supposedly replied. “He’s here ahl the time. Ah’m not lockin’ ‘im up just cuz we’ve got customers.”
The story, I suspect, has been exaggerated in the telling, and it has been told a lot. I heard it at least four times that afternoon as the clock ticked round to ten to three. “Another round, lads?”
The Stadium of Light lies just across the river but it’s about a 15-minute walk from the King’s, round behind the B&Q and over the bridge. Nobody was in much of a hurry to get there. I don’t get to many games as a fan these days. I’d assumed Sunderland would be alright despite their poor start to the season. It didn’t take much of that game against Birmingham to realise how complacent I’d been. They were awful. They conceded a soft goal, equalised soon after and then did nothing, not even when Birmingham had a man sent off midway through the second half.
But worse was the sense of flatness. There should have been fury, virtuoso explosions of effs and cees, but there was a numb acceptance. This was just how it was. When a mate rang his wife to ask her to come and pick up their seven-year-old who, just after half-time at his first ever game, had decided he was bored and wanted to go home, most of us would happily have left with him.
In the whole of 2017, Sunderland took the lead three times in home league games. The first time, against Bolton, it lasted three minutes and within 10 minutes they were behind. The second time, against Millwall, it lasted four minutes and within eight minutes they were behind. The third time, against Fulham, the goal came after 77 minutes and Sunderland held on. They were ahead for 20 minutes at home in an entire year. Get battered around the head often enough and you lose the capacity to care.
This is far, far worse than Sunderland’s only previous relegation to the third flight, in 1987. Then, at least, there was a heroic last stand in a play-off, which that season involved the side third-bottom of the second flight and the teams third, fourth and fifth in the third. After a 3-2 defeat at Gillingham, Sunderland won 4-3 at home (after extra-time) to be relegated on away goals.
The night before the second leg, I had dinner with my mam and dad at the Roker Hotel where, it turned out, the Gillingham team were staying. We saw them, in their tracksuits, wandering along the seafront. The next time we went to the Roker, we got home to find our budgie dying in the bottom of her cage. We never went back.
It hasn’t just been the football this season. There’s been a pervasive sense of fecklessness and incompetence encapsulated by James Vaughan’s reaction to scoring at Burton. As he cupped a hand to his ear while running towards sceptical away fans, the club’s official Twitter feed congratulated him on getting his first for the club. That evening, he pointed out it was his second. The official feed apologised, noting it had been so long since his previous goal that they’d forgotten.
Darron Gibson crashed a wedding after a 5-0 defeat to Celtic in a friendly to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Stadium of Light and drunkenly insisted to anybody who’d listen that most of the squad didn’t care. His contract was terminated six months later after an incident on his way into the training ground on St Patrick’s Day. Three times over the limit, he drove his Mercedes 4x4 into four parked cars.
And then there was the 17-year-old fan who dropped his trousers in the North Stand during the 3-1 defeat to Reading at the beginning of December and was alleged to have defecated in his seat. He insisted he’d only urinated and blamed his pre-match consumption of 12 beers, six ciders and two Advent calendar chocolates.
The details, frankly, were largely irrelevant. It just added to the sense of a ludicrous club hell-bent on embarrassing itself. But on the plus side the King’s now has a parrot.
