FORGET last week’s Championship action – the real stuff gets under way this weekend and it’s an exciting time to be a Sunderland fan.

We’ve got a new owner, a new manager and four or five new players, and it’s going to be interesting to see how things bed in. I’m pretty confident that we’ll hit the ground running.

Lee Cattermole’s arrival this week has got the fans talking, and I think it’s telling that Steve Bruce has strengthened right down the spine of his side.

He’s signed a centreback, a central midfielder and a centre-forward, and we have a much stronger look about us now than we had at the end of last season.

I’m impressed with the signing of Cattermole – he’s a battler who’ll get stuck in no matter who he’s up against – but it’s the Darren Bent deal that could really be the big one.

People say that Darren didn’t really get a look in at Spurs last season, but they forget he was comfortably the top scorer before Robbie Keane arrived and they changed the team around.

I’m looking forward to seeing how he fits in with Kenwyne Jones. Things obviously didn’t work between Kenwyne and Djibril Cisse last season, but Darren should be the perfect foil for the way Kenwyne likes to play. And although Bent has hogged the headlines in the last few days, Kenwyne is still the main match-winner in the Sunderland squad.

Hopefully, we’ll see that at Bolton. The first game is always important, but with the way the fixtures have come out, the first month of this season could be even more important than ever.

If you take the Chelsea match out of the equation, Sunderland play Bolton, Blackburn, Stoke, Hull, Burnley and Wolves in their first seven games. To me, every one of those matches is winnable.

I would think that Steve is targeting between 12 and 15 points from the first seven games, so a win at Bolton today would be a big step on the way to that kind of tally.

MIDDLESBROUGH and Newcastle started last weekend of course, and while they’ll both have been fairly happy with a point, I’m sure they got a bit of a wake-up call in terms of what they can expect this season.

Boro were solid at the back against Sheffield United, but the two centrehalves will have to repeat that in every match they play in the Championship.

They’ll be up against big, physical centre-forwards every week and they’ll have to be up for the challenge.

Newcastle rallied quite well after going a goal behind, but the size of their squad remains a massive source of concern.

They’ve lost their two best defenders and their three best strikers since the end of last season and at the moment they don’t look like promotion contenders to me.

■ Micky Horswill was speaking to Scott Wilson.

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