The badge is very much based on the City's Coat of Arms with one or two landmarks thrown in for good measure..The origins of the clubs long association with the name 'Black Cats' is often disputed. One version is that after a run of bad results in a season somewhere around the early 19 hundreds, one of the players brought a stray black cat into the changing rooms, and the teams fortunes changed for the better. The other version is that 'The Black Cats' were the name of two of the anti-aircraft guns based in Sunderland during the 2nd World War.