Thankfully, Black Cat Friday didn’t materialise

LAST Friday promised to be a fairly quiet day at our fanzine’s HQ. Sure, Sunderland had been awful for almost a month, but we’ve been bad for most of the 30 odd years I’ve been following them, so that’s no big deal.

But then a rumour hit the city that Roy Keane had fallen out of love with SAFC and had walked away from the club. The first text about the subject hit my phone at 11.30am and it didn’t stop ringing, beeping and generally going nuts until someone from Sunderland’s press office slipped our local newspaper a word to say it was all a lie.

It was amazing to see just how easy it is for rumours to take on a life of their own. Our magazine’s message board was one of the first places that news leaked of Roy’s apparent departure. Then a local radio station took the plunge and ran the story on their midday news bulletin. From there Sky and Setanta picked up on it and before I’d had a chance to gauge an opinion on Keane’s tenure it was being broadcast as fact from Athlone to Azerbaijan.