Sunderland's Greatest Player Of The Last Ten Years: You Decide!

Right then, the pressure is on you the great Roker Report-reading public to decide who is the greatest Sunderland player of the last ten years.

Why did we choose the last ten years? Well initially it was to be "since the turn of the century" but factoring in a likely runaway victory for Kevin Phillips, Niall Quinn or Tommy Sorensen we chanced it to the last ten years -- so since the start of the 2003/04 season.

And for the pedants we know SuperKev was with us for a short while at the start of that season, but we're looking at what they did for us from that season onwards. He didn't contribute.

So, behind the scenes here we chose 32 players from the last ten years to go into the tournament. This was a bit of a challenge trying to find that many worthy candidates since 2003, and you can probably tell where the pickings got a little slim towards the 25-32 mark of compiling our entrants.

Here's how it's going to work:

• We have created a bracket system, akin to say Wimbledon or the latter stages of the World Cup whereby you know who might face who in the next round.
• Each writer here has been dished out some players and will fight for them in each round in which they appear throughout.
• We will post a new match up each day. You only have one day to cast your vote before we move on to the next one.
• This will run for as many days as we need it to.
• The bracket was drawn at random. Each players name written down, folded up and put in a hat. When you see what some of them are, you'll know we didn't make this up at all!
• The voting is completely up to you, so whoever wins, wins. No complaints can be made as quite simply you should have voted for who you wanted to win. There'll be transparency throughout as you'll be able to see the vote counts for each player on each poll.

The Bracket:

Here it is folks...

CLICK HERE to view a larger version of the bracket.

So that's how it's going to work, and the first matchup starts later on today... Be sure to get voting.