The 5-3 win over the Scottish champions, Hearts, by the 1895 First Division winners was set against a backdrop of unease about money, imported players and new competitions
The Club World Cup has never stimulated universal enthusiasm. “The whole case goes to show how undesirable such events are from a sporting point of view, and what a prostitution of titles they are,” raged the Edinburgh Evening News, but that was 1895 and it wasn’t talking about the soft-power festival of greed that, in the distant days before the virus, was supposed to be taking place in China in the summer of 2021.
Rather it was talking about the first meeting of league winners of England and Scotland, of the match played 125 years ago on Monday, in which Sunderland became world champions.
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