Sunderland are on their way back to the Championship after overcoming Wycombe Wanderers as well as the burden of both their size and history.
As simple as that, it was done. As Ross Stewart cut inside and fired his low shot past David Stockdale to put Sunderland 2-0 up with 12 minutes to play in their League One play-off final against Wycombe Wanderers, you could only wonder why they couldn’t simply play football with such simple elegance more often and spare their long-suffering supporters a considerable amount of angst.
May had been a month of nervous energy for Sunderland, all culminating in another trip to London. They’ve been here before, of course, and more than most. This was their seventh appearance in the play-offs since their introduction; in the previous six, they’d been relegated once and promoted once, with that promotion in 1990 only coming after the team who’d beaten them, Swindon Town, were kicked out of the competition over financial shenanigans.
That sense of yearning for something better after a more than a decade during which their team has been relegated twice and pushed to the financial brink oozes from the club’s every pore. Almost 44,000 tickets were put on sale for this match. They were all sold in a matter of days. When Wycombe couldn’t sell their allocation in full, a further 2,500 tickets were made available and devoured in no time at all. On the Friday before the match, fans started to congregate in Trafalgar Square. Thousands of them, a sea of red and white, seeking safety (and potentially solace) in numbers, that familiar feeling of dread counter-balanced by the near-infinite capacity that the football fan has for hope. This time, surely, it would be different.
And this time it was.
The ticket situation summed up the difference in the sheer scale of these two clubs. Sunderland joined the Football League in 1890, and were not relegated from the top flight until 1958. During those early years, William McGregor, the…
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