Breaking News: Sunderland’s top veteran ace will say goodbye to many people on Saturday, some of them will be emotional and some less so.

Saturday will be a day of farewells for Sunderland — some emotional and others less so

Tomorrow’s forty sixth and final game of what’s largely been a dismal season for Sunderland will tie up several loose ends as we head to the Stadium of Light for (mercifully, some might say) the final time before the summer break.

Despite the Lads having little to play for other than pride and the possibility of minutes for exciting young winger Tommy Watson, the game is far from inconsequential, not least for the 2,000+ travelling fans who’ll be in attendance.

In the first instance, it could well be the day on which Sheffield Wednesday complete their own version of the ‘Great Escape’, with Danny Röhl’s side requiring only a point to guarantee their second tier survival. Indeed, they might not even need to achieve that, should results elsewhere go their way.

For the Owls and their German alchemist of a head coach, it would be a remarkable turnaround.

Indeed, if they were to beat us and finish a mere three points shy of our total, it would just about sum up the way in which our season has turned sour in recent months, as well as being an outcome that seemed impossible when we strolled past them at Hillsborough earlier in the season.

Closer to home, tomorrow also marks Mike Dodds’ final game in charge after a three-month spell that’s consisted of press conferences conducted in the third person, peculiar team selections, ropey performances, underwhelming results, and Dodds himself seldom looking comfortable with leading the team, even in an interim capacity.

Few will be sad to see his spell as caretaker boss come to an end, and the fact that he was parachuted in following Michael Beale’s exit was typical of the muddled thinking that’s gone a long way towards screwing up our season. The players might’ve been nice and comfortable under ‘Doddsy’, but the fans certainly haven’t been.

However, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, ‘We’ll always have The Hawthorns, the Cardiff City Stadium, and the night on which we bored Leeds United stiff at Elland Road, grinding out a point in the process’.

Photo by Richard Sellers/PA Images via Getty Images

It’s probably safe to say that we won’t be bidding a tearful, Ingrid Bergman-style farewell to Dodds (or Mason Burstow, for that matter) and for the club hierarchy, time is of the essence as the search for a permanent replacement for Michael Beale hopefully reaches a swift conclusion. Once the final whistle blows, the hard work needs to begin in earnest, as the scale of this summer’s task is daunting, to say the least.

However, Wednesday’s potential survival, Dodds exiting stage left and even the possibility of Jack Clarke bidding farewell to Sunderland (and signing off with a goal, perhaps?) all pale into insignificance when the real story of tomorrow’s game is considered, and that’ll be Sunderland fans uniting to mourn the passing of Charlie Hurley and to celebrate the legacy of man they called ‘The King’.

For so many of us, tales of Hurley’s toughness and dedication to the red and white cause are legion, passed down from one generation to the next, and even if you never saw figures of such stature play, you begin to learn exactly how influential they were from those who were fortunate enough to have done so, including our Roker Report colleague Kelvin Beattie.

When the news of Hurley’s passing broke last week, my first port of call was my dad. Born in 1957, he grew up watching the Irishman gracing the turf at Roker Park and taking no prisoners- something of which I’ll always be incredibly jealous.