Island Meet-Up With Double Wembley Hero
Ashley Ball with Alan Sunderland in Gozo.
Alan Sunderland has received a surprise visit on his sunshine isle – from someone eager to learn more about his life in Wolverhampton and South Yorkshire.
Barnsley Chronicle sports-writer Ashley Ball, author of the forthcoming Feeding The Wolves book that we have written about on here more than once, kindly sent us photos of their meet-up as they whiled away a few hours together.
“I was over there with my partner, Krisztina, for a mate’s wedding and Alan agreed to come down to see us in the resort where we were staying,” Ashley said today before going off to report on the Rotherham v Wigan League One clash.
“We had a coffee together, a couple of zero per cent lagers and a great chat. It was part-interview but with lots of reminiscing thrown in, too.
“He seems to be enjoying the relaxed life he has over there. He told us he lives in a nice house with a pool and plays tennis a couple of times a week.
“We had about five hours with him and he remains grateful that Mark Crook and Wath Wanderers changed the direction of his life by helping him towards a brilliant career in football when he might have joined many others of his age by going down the pit.”
Sunderland, a League Cup final winner with Wolves in 1974 and then the scorer of the dramatic deciding goal in Arsenal’s 1979 FA Cup final win over Manchester United, left the UK in the late 1990s.
He initially lived in Malta but then moved to the nearby island of Gozo, where he now is and where Wolves played some end-of-season games in 1985 as light relief from their nosedive down the Football League.
Alan with a newspaper cutting detailing his move from Wath to Molineux.
The 72-year-old won a single senior England cap – in a 2-1 victory over Australia in Sydney in 1980 – but might conceivably have taken a different path into international football.
He is half-German from his mother’s side and, as a schoolboy in Rotherham, went to train more than once in the holidays with Borussia Dortmund.
We are delighted to keep the pot boiling on behalf of the eagerly-awaited Feeding The Wolves publication and recommend it strongly to our readers.
Anyone wishing to pre-order a copy, at a reduced cost, can do so by clicking on https://dondearneschoolfootball.wordpress.com/mark-crooks-wath-wolves