EPL Round 20: Sunderland AFC vs Bolton Wanderers FC

By: Lucas | December 29th, 2007

Today at the Stadium of Light Liam Miller returns to the lineup, and we get Chopra, Kenwyne and Cole playing up front against a Bolton team still just barely free of the drop zone.

The game isn’t being shown live here (I get Chelsea vs newcastle, whoopee), and I may miss the replay this afternoon because of Real Life getting in the way. So here’s a pre-emptive “Ha’Way the Lads!” and I hope to return to football-land later to discover 3 juicy points in Sunderland’s basket. Either way I’ll have more to write later. Cheers.

LATER THAT DAY…

Well that’s certainly a nice result. 3-1 to the Red & White and out of the relegation zone (again).

I went downtown with my best gal, we had brunch and did a little meandering. Said meandering brought us to an “English style bar” that advertises itself as my “place to catch all EPL Soccer.” I and most of my soccer-fan friends normally avoid this place as an overpriced phony frat-boy bar; but they do show a lot of football and rugby, and it’s smoke-free which is a big plus for getting the gal (i.e., The Boss) to come into a bar with me. So we went in and it was, as expected, shit.

The ending of the West Ham vs Man Utd game was on when we got in there (nice cheer from a group of Hammers fans when Upson’s header went in), so we sat down and ordered ourselves a pint thinking the Sunderland match would be up next (because it was, you know, up next on Setanta’s schedule). Then they put on the on-demand Tottenham vs Reading match, because the score had just been shown and the bartender had a chubby over the idea of “a team scoring 4 goals and losing!” Whatever, it just reinforces what I already knew: this particular “English style bar” is not my “place to catch all EPL Soccer.” I’ll stick with the “American dive bar” a little further up the road, which opens early enough to show games live and has more atmosphere in one hobo’s pinkynail than in all the backward baseball caps in town (also the booze is astonishingly cheap, and they serve good gyros, too).

(For any Portlanders reading this, the English bar I’m ranting against is not the Horse Brass Pub, which is a great place to watch a game and eat a full English breakfast. I’m referring to the McDisney Dick VanDyke British Bar downtown, which will go nameless in this post to avoid giving them any inadvertent net traffic.)

IN ANY CASE…

This is what I know about the game itself: Kenwyne Jones was huge, scoring one goal and setting up the other two. Bolton seems to have controlled large chunks of possession, but could only manage one sloppy El-Hadji Diouf goal, off a free kick late in the first half. Kieran Richardson made only his second start of the season, and first in over 4 months, scoring the opener in the 13th minute and setting up Kenwyne’s goal 20 minutes later. Good to have you back, Kieran! Substitute Daryl Murphy closed the scoring in stoppage time for a 3-1 final and 3 enormous points.

Roy Keane lauded his team’s gutty play, saying “We’ve played a lot better this year and not won but today we ground out a good win.”

I’ll have more to write about this between now and next Wednesday’s game at Blackburn. For now I’ll happily peruse the highlights (fyi, 101greatgoals.com is a fantastic website) and look forward to carrying some momentum to Ewood Park and possibly getting our first road win. Enjoy the highlights here.