SO SAD;Sunderland AFC key receive a heartbreak due to…
I’ll confess, I wasn’t actually in Eppleton on Monday evening to see Sunderland U21s dole out a 6-0 thrashing to poor, unsuspecting Derby County. Instead, for reasons that are hard to discern in hindsight, I was at my local Odeon, watching the new Joker movie. (I’m a football writer, not a film critic, but honestly, don’t bother.)
Right around the time that the trailers were ending and I should have been turning it off, however, my phone buzzed; Aaron Connolly – the free agent signing, the uncharacteristic roll of Kristjaan Speakman’s dice – was to make his first appearance of any kind in a red and white shirt. And so, it was within this context that I came home a couple of hours later, fired up YouTube, rewound the live stream, and cast a beady eye over the Irishman’s debut. There can’t be many people pulling the old Joaquin Phoenix/Graeme Murty double feature in one evening, but here we are. As for Connolly himself, forget a joker in the pack, he might just end up being the Black Cats’ ace in the hole.
The headlines, of course, will be dedicated to his goal. If there were any niggling doubts over the 24-year-old’s canniness in the final third, he dispelled them in less than half an hour against the Rams. Away he streaked down the left, all dust clouds and frosted tips, defender in his wake, before angling his dash towards the box and coolly slotting an effort beyond the on-rushing goalkeeper. It was, in cliched parlance, a striker’s finish, the kind honed and perfected over years upon years of repeated exposure to similarly gilded chances.
But Connolly offered more than just a pleasing turn of pace and a single moment of composure. Throughout his first half showing, he pressed well, hassled his centre-backs, generally made a nuisance of himself. There is something terrier-like to him; the low centre of gravity, the tenacious way in which he nips and nibbles at ankles.
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