Even at Wembley Stadium, you possibly can’t miss out on the Northernness of two units of followers from Sheffield and the North East. It’s within the Yorkshire grumblings over costs and VAR delays. It’s within the ‘fook’ within the Sunderland finish’s chants of, “Your help is f**king shit”. On this 2025 Championship Play-off Ultimate, nonetheless, that provincial pleasure was on the pitch as nicely.
Speak across the £220 million match, or no matter that sum has been inflated to for the reason that closing whistle blew, is commonly centered on every group’s superstars – Gus Hamer, Jobe Bellingham et al. It’s a worldwide occasion; a ceremony of passage into the Premier League, that almost all international of entities, and so there’s not a lot room within the narrative for native ties.
I maintain my palms up: I did briefly think about writing an article underneath the headline, ‘Sunderland’s Euro imaginative and prescient has Blades asking, “What the hell simply occurred?”’, earlier than realising I used to be writing it mainly only for that headline. Sure, Sunderland have proven canny recruitment from overseas. However their signing of younger abilities from abroad, whose price will solely have been boosted additional by the membership’s promotion to the Premier League, is just a part of the Sunderland story – and arguably not an important.
Captain Dan Neil grew up within the North East and has made virtually 200 appearances for Sunderland at simply 23 (Picture credit score: Getty Pictures)
Captaining them at Wembley was Dan Neil, an academy participant born in South Shields, who was making his 197th first-team look for the membership, his membership. Dan Neil is 23. That quantity alone reveals an astonishing stage of consistency for a midfielder of his age, and whereas this wasn’t one among Neil’s higher performances, particularly within the context of a wonderful season for the Black Cats’ younger chief, he carried the feelings and goals of each supporter from the stands onto the pitch.
