Football FanCast columnist and Newcastle Utd man Chris Mackin looks back at the easy day at the office on Sunday and wonders whatever happened to great revolution that was supposedly happening down the road.

There was a bloke by me up near the top of the Milburn stand on Sunday who was clearly a Sunderland fan. Edgy and silent throughout, and conspicuously subdued when Owen scored his first, he eventually left when Newcastle got their penalty never to be seen again. Timid and meek, his presence was ill advised and sensibly re-assessed and aborted at half time. He will take little solace in his role yesterday as a walking literacy device, particularly as his otherwise note perfect allegorical performance, his on the money metaphorical channelling of his team's dismal showing, did not extend to the "re-assessed and aborted at half time" bit.

Always fond of- and tremendously skilled at- making themselves look foolish, Sunderland fans have spent the duration of Newcastle's recent run of form dismissing the defeated teams- Fulham, Reading and Spurs- as hapless also-rans; the Portsmouth team we drew with apparently distracted and playing to avoid injury. How typical of Newcastle supporters they all said, putting words into our mouths and too distracted by laughing at their own jokes to notice than at no point had any Newcastle supporter actually got over excited or claimed that we are going to win the league next season.

Shoddy nobodies there to be beaten, not at all a testament to the good work Kevin has been getting on with, that was their position. It was a argument carefully crafted to ignore lots of crucial factors- Keegan's tactics tinkering, Reading's spirited performance at St. James and the fact that outside of the top four the Premiership is one giant splodge of indistinguishable mush anyway - but it wasn't until Sunday that we realized how tremendously inappropriate and hypocritical their dismissal of ‘Spurs and Reading had been. You could argue on one hand that if anybody was well placed to judge hopeless Premiership teams it would be Sunderland supporters, on the other you wonder how a set of fans watching such a shocking team feel well placed to comment on other's failings, it goes way beyond throwing stones in glass houses, they were placing mining devices under the foundations and going after the windows with hammers, they may as well have been taunting Southampton supporters about their red and white shirts.

So the great revolution they've been boring everybody about was all a giant fraud after all. The worst Sunderland team for many a year came with a cowardly game plan, a manager with as much tactical acumen and ability to motivate as a damp and underfed kitten and in Paul McShane a footballer so bad he makes Ali Dai with a hangover look like Edison Arantes do Nascimento.

Seeing a bad Sunderland side at St. James' is hardly a novelty, but there was a genuine sense of disbelief about the haplessness of this one, our players seemed as shocked as us, they spent the entire second half misplacing passes and getting forward sluggishly, seemingly double checking the fliers to confirm they got the right date. "Oh", everybody said at the final whistle, "maybe they'll give us a game next time".

Ask Sunderland fans to name their best players and they'd probably say Jones- lively and handy in the air, talented but limited and not quite the Hristro Stoichkov they had disingenuously led us to believe he was; or Reid, who fluffed as many of his neat little passes on Sunday as he completed and who's only function appeared to be acting as a handy rejoinder to the Sunderland supporter's taunts about Viduka's weight. They rate Evans too, but their problem on Sunday in defence on Sunday wasn't Evans' absence, it was McShane's presence, and as Evans is actually a Manchester United player who Alex Ferguson presumably rates less than Wes Brown and Roy Keane signed McShane they may want to be choosy about how vocal they are about the relative strengths and failings of the two. The rest of them are classless plodders, heavy footed and anonymous with as much wit and imagination on the ball as a warm up comedian making jokes about women drivers.

Their support on Sunday too, not so much responding to theirs team performance as mirroring it directly, was inexplicably silent throughout. "Don't you always win 2-1?", the Newcastle fans chanted at one point and though it was a chant that betrayed the amount of alcohol we'd all consumed and our devilishly ironic nature there was also a genuine imploration to it; we fancied a bit of a boogie and a sing song with them and they didn't want to know, hanging out in the corner by the bar and avoiding eye contact all night. Impolite, frankly.

Before the match Niall Quinn, with astonishing lack of accuracy, looked back on the ‘99 derby he played and scored in as a night when "top of the table Newcastle were defeated by little Sunderland" and, thus affronted, responded by sacking their manager. It's a bizarre way to reminisce on a game wherein second bottom of the league Newcastle were beaten by mid-table Sunderland, but is helpful as a tuition on how Sunderland view the game of football; sneakily twisting every fact to fit in with their skewered perception of a cruel world that exists solely to lay grief on their doorstep, always being downtrodden and ridiculed or outright ignored by The Man operating on the behest of Big Nasty Newcastle United.

This insane jealous streak and inferiority complex makes them unpleasant enough, adding delusions of grandeur into the mix made them simply unbearable. So, relief then, that their team made a mockery of their claims of skill, grit and potential; not a great derby match but more than satisfying, a gleeful bursting of balloons and wounding of egos, I only hope they have enough bottle in them to see off Bolton and Birmingham in the next few weeks to give us the opportunity to re-schedule for next year.