Working class heroes

A year by the Wear:Sure enough, they've called it Keano's. A new version of a small old bar over there by the bus stop at the top of North Bridge Street, it stands freshly painted, waiting for custom, in sight of the Stadium of Light.

Fifty yards away the bookmaker's window advertises odds of 500 to 1 against Sunderland winning the Premiership this season, as if it were some kind of bargain. They are waiting inside there, too. Sunderland is a city holding its breath: Roy Keane, the football club, hope and trade, they feel entwined as never before.

The expectation in Sunderland has become almost physical. So when talk elsewhere is of the fascination of this new Ireland-inspired Sunderland in the Premiership under Keane in his first full season as a manager, and Niall Quinn and the Irish consortium of owners, Drumaville, be not in doubt that it means more to Wearside than mere curiosity.

There has long been a temptation to exaggerate the significance of professional football in places such as the northeast of England, but it is easy also to underplay it, dress it down, to say it's only football. And when history reviews Sunderland in 2007, it will stress the increasing role of the football club in the city's sense of itself. In fact, many are not waiting for history, they are saying it now.

They are words that come with a mixture of pride and pessimism, something of a local characteristic. "Increasingly, we are no longer part of Sunderland's identity," Quinn said this week when discussing club and city, "we are the identity."

David Byrne is professor of sociology at Durham University. "Five-eighths Irish", as Byrne described himself, he agreed with Quinn's analysis: "The football club has taken on a lot of symbolism for a lot of people," he explained. "Sunderland's history is all about heavy industry, the Industrial Revolution. With the development of northeast coal you got carboniferous capitalism. And once you could get coal on to a ship, it became much more valuable. That's what Sunderland comes from.

"That then sucks in people, and the biggest single group of immigrants were Irish, from west Ulster and north Connacht. But then Sunderland's shipyards were closed so that Harland and Wolff could be kept open, and coal disappeared because of a decision to smash organised labour. It's since then that the football club, which of course has a stadium on the site of a former colliery, takes on a heightened identity."

Climb the stairs inside the Stadium of Light and a huge miners' banner greets you. This is not tokenism, the ground's name comes from a memory of the Davy lamp. And yet today, to see coal or ships, the displays in the Winter Gardens have to be visited.

They are worth a look. A short video clip informs: "It's in our blood, football, like shipbuilding. You can't imagine Sunderland without football or shipbuilding."

But 1988 saw the end of shipbuilding on the Wear. That came during the fallout out of the miners' strike. The twin pillars of Sunderland's reason for existence were being dismantled and that unwelcome development resonates. Unlike the population of other northern English cities such as Manchester or Liverpool, or Leeds or Newcastle, there are days unquestionably when Sunderland views itself as a beaten place.

Low self-esteem, pain and grievance are in evidence. To the neutral there is a striking lack of self-celebration about Sunderland. For the visitor it starts with a train station that makes Connolly station look like the Louvre.

LS Lowry spent years painting the Wear and Joseph Conrad set off on a Sunderland-built clipper before writing Heart of Darkness, but you need to be looking for that information to find it. At least there is some self-recognition regarding Lewis Carroll, who is claimed to have invented chunks of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in nearby Whitburn, which once led to a "Malice in Sunderland" headline after yet another defeat.

There have been plenty of those. When the Sunderland of 2003 were relegated with the lowest number of points in Premiership history, city confidence took another unhappy slap. When, three years later, that historic low was outdone - by Sunderland - embarrassment set in.

As the club laid off 40 per cent of its non-playing staff to try to stem the 60 million debt which Drumaville would inherit, the following statistics came forth: seven of Britain's 25 most deprived wards are within a five-mile radius of the club; 37 per cent of local families live on the poverty line; a fifth of the surrounding population lacks basic literacy skills. School truancy is alarmingly high. The data came from the club.

That 15-point relegation season climaxed just 16 months ago. The deeds of Quinn and Keane may have come to dominate perspectives since, but on Wearside the Irish intervention is not seen as some Year Zero, it is part of a story stretching back to 1879 and into the future. Top-flight humiliation, therefore, is as pertinent to many as May's Championship exhilaration.

How Wearside wishes Keane to be the face of a dynasty, but the fatalism bred by experience, in football and away from football, is strong. Sunderland's last major trophy, the FA Cup, was won as a second division club in 1973 - you have to be at least 40 to appreciate it; Sunderland's last league title came in 1936 - you'd need to be 80 to be still savouring that.

"I know," said Quinn, his voice immediately catching community anxiety, "the fans are caught somewhere in between. Emotionally, they are caught between wanting us to protect their club, not lose, not waste money, and then on the other hand they can't help themselves wanting us to "have a go", spend big.

"I know it's difficult, but Sunderland fans need to stay focused, they need to know that we know what we're doing. Roy and I have been players, seen it from that side, we know how it all works and we know we could buy six wonder names and have an exciting 18 months.

"But look at clubs who have done that and look at them five years later. I have a responsibility to protect the club, to be solid, to give a pathway for Roy and myself to explore.

"We know who we are and we know Sunderland. This is not Knightsbridge, we're different, we have something else, and the one big ingredient is the people and their noise. We are aware of our history, of days when men went from the pit to the club and sometimes into the team.

"What I've said all along, and Roy would be 100 per cent behind me on this, is that because we're Sunderland we need a certain type of character. Recruitment is everything, what we're trying to recreate is the passion and spirit of the terraces in a team."

But Quinn knows the pits have vanished along with the shipyards. He compares Sunderland to Ringsend, where his father, Billy, once worked, in terms of its working-class ethic and authenticity. Pride is taken in that: in Sunderland, being called working class is not the accusation it is elsewhere in Brown's Britain. Quinn also spoke of the "spirit of coal" in his adopted city.

Quinn has saved Sunderland from a fate akin to Leeds United's. The club cannot drive an area's economy, though. Yet it can be a beacon. To do so it must stabilise and re-establish itself as a Premiership regular, rather than the "yo-yo club" Keane has referred to more than once this summer.

It begins next Saturday at home to Tottenham Hotspur, Keane's team as a boy in Cork.

First up, today, to celebrate 10 years on top of the old Monkwearmouth colliery, it is Juventus in a friendly.

In Sunderland's dreams it is a fixture they would love to have competitively.

Having re-pointed the club over the past 12 months, Quinn is now taking time to consider such ambition. "We have to be getting ourselves ready for what football will be like in five years' time, in 10 years' time. We have to be thinking about the expansion of the club in global terms. People see the spirit of coal here and - pardon the pun - we are bursting at the seam. But it really is all about hard work."

It beats waiting.

Michael Walker's "A Year by the Wear" will appear every week in Sports Saturday