 Monday, 26th Nov 2012 18:14 by Clive Whittingham Far from kicking on to a life of top half finishes and cup runs as looked to be the case when Martin O’Neill first arrived, Sunderland are in danger of returning to the relegation scrap he first found them in. OverviewJust about the only thing Harry Redknapp has in his favour at QPR is that, despite only taking four points from the first 13 matches, Rangers are not as adrift at the bottom of the table as they might be. Seven points from safety and five away from the team directly above them in the table is bad enough, but given that Reading have only won once and Villa and Sunderland only twice it could be a hell of a lot worse. To see newly promoted Reading and Southampton down there, along with Villa who are attempting to slash their playing budget, is no real great surprise, but for Sunderland it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Martin O’Neilll has a reputation for taking middle of the road Premier League teams like the Mackems and turning them into sides that dwell in the top half of the table and cause trouble in the cup competitions. Having found Sunderland ensconced in the relegation mire a year ago with two wins from their first 15 games O’Neill quickly embarked on a run of 11 wins and five draws from 21 matches and it looked like he was on the way to working his magic again. They looked a good bet for the FA Cup as well, roaring through matches with Peterborough, Middlesbrough and Arsenal. When QPR turned up at the Stadium of Light in March they were swept aside 3-1 and with an FA Cup quarter final replay against Everton to come at home that week there seemed to be no stopping the Black Cats. So what happened? Well, Sunderland hit upon an Everton side enjoying its usual end of season peak in form in the cup match and were well beaten on their own patch. It effectively ended the season on Wearside with the league status secure and no trophy left to play for. They finished the year with five draws, four defeats, and no victories. That propensity to draw games rather than lose, and lose games they should have drawn, continued into this season which started with four draws in the league, followed by a 1-0 home win against Wigan aided by a harsh sending off, and has since included four defeats, two draws and just one other solitary victory at Fulham where they were again helped by a controversial sending off. Any confidence or momentum they may have taken from a fine result at Craven Cottage was destroyed at the weekend by a hapless display riddled with individual errors in a 4-2 home set back against West Brom. Much like Bolton, whose 2010/11 campaign was brought to a shuddering halt by a confidence sapping FA Cup thrashing, Sunderland found that there is more to shaking off a poor end to the previous campaign than simply going away for your summer holidays And this all seems rather strange. Sunderland are certainly not wanting for support or facilities, they have a manager who has achieved great things at this level before with clubs of similar size, they have a chairman who seems quite happy to continue bankrolling expensive player acquisitions – O’Neilll was allowed to spend the thick end of £20m on Adam Johnson and Stephen Fletcher this summer – so what’s the problem?
For me, I think it’s quite possible that there isn’t really a problem here at all. In modern football every team is only three straight defeats away from the media claiming it’s a crisis, every manager only a couple of bad results away from losing his job. It’s easy, when football is covered 24 hours a day seven days a week - time that needs filling with stories – to make a drama and a crisis out of what used to be known as a team going through a rough patch. They have only lost four times in the league this year at the end of the day, and their draws at Arsenal, Stoke, Swansea and West Ham could be seen as good results. But I think there are a couple of similarities between QPR and Sunderland with regards to their transfer market activity. Sunderland, like Rangers, certainly aren’t shy to spend big money and often, like QPR, look to places like Manchester United for their acquisitions. The problem is, when you take Wes Brown, John O’Shea and the likes out of the world class team at Old Trafford they first and foremost experience having to graft and play at their absolute maximum just to get a draw for the first time, when previously they’ve played for a team that can coast through many of its matches, and secondly they don’t look half as good without the likes of Rooney and Scholes around them. Plus, as at Loftus Road, there’s a scattergun approach to the acquisitions and a lack of forward planning. According to Soccerbase, since winning promotion back to the Premier League five years ago, Sunderland have spent £146m on 45 new players under four different managers. And yet by the end of last season they still had Kieran Richardson, who’d broken into the England squad playing left wing for West Brom and Man Utd, playing out of position at left full back. Once again this summer another four players arrived, another £22m went out of the account, and still no left back was signed. With Richardson now at Fulham, Sunderland have another winger, Danny Rose, playing at left back out of position on loan from Spurs. Occasional attempts have been made to fill the spot – Roy Keane signed Ian Harte, O’Neill brought in Wayne Bridge on loan last January – but I find it really amazing that a club can spend that much money on that many players under four different managers and not address a clear problem position. More crucially, it’s a similar story in attack where prior to the Fulham game a week ago they’d scored just seven goals in ten matches, and five of them had gone to Stephen Fletcher. The Scot has proved a fine acquisition, but he is very much playing up front by himself. Sunderland are yet to recover from cashing in on Darren Bent only to find that Asamoah Gyan fancied the money in the Middle East rather more than actual competitive football in the Premier League. I remember watching a fabulous Sunderland performance and 3-0 victory at Chelsea two seasons ago, when Gyan was unplayable, and Bent scored 36 goals in 54 appearances for them. They were always going to be hard to replace, and Sunderland settled on a series of short term fixes like bringing in Danny Welbeck and then Nicklas Bendtner on loan. The only thing close to forward planning in the striker department was the acquisition of Connor Wickham from Ipswich, but again they overpaid massively for somebody who’d shown nothing more than decent potential and are yet to see any return on that investment. Sunderland will surely spend again in January to beef up their anaemic forward line but, much like QPR, if the short term aim of survival in the top flight is achieved then it’s a club that really, really has to look at the way it’s recruiting its players and adopt a longer term strategy than simply bringing in loans each year or throwing money at big names. Interview
When we were last at Sunderland in March the mood seemed amazingly upbeat. You won that day, but I think you've only won twice since. What has gone wrong? It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what's gone wrong to be honest. Last season the FA Cup defeat to Everton completely knocked the wind out of our sails, so it was understandable we struggled through the rest of the season. However this year it seems to have been a combination of things. Some players have failed to find form, others seem to have struggled to adapt to the system we're playing now. It started as a 4-2-3-1 and now seems to have reverted to more of a 4-4-1-1 or 4-4-2 depending how you look at it. Things have improved since the switch to the latter. Having Sessegnon, Johnson and McClean in behind Fletcher looks fearsome on paper, but in reality it was more a case of too many chiefs and not enough Indians. We've definitely got the talent to turn things around, just needs to happen sooner rather than later. Have the fans turned on Martin O’Neilll? Do people think he can turn it around? Who or what are the alternatives if he can't? A vocal and moronic minority have turned on him, which is sad to see. I have no doubt at all he can turn it round though. It hasn't been as good as we'd have like, of course not, but despite recent results things have improved. We murdered Everton for an hour at Goodison. The Fulham game showed what we can do and the West Brom game had any number of anomaly's which don't normally happen. As for seeing who could come in. A quick look around suggests that there's nobody really who's worth a damn. I'm more than happy with O’Neilll at this point. What is the side lacking? What do you need from the January transfer window? A big bastard. Whilst we've got plenty of skilful players in and around the midfield, we need some physicality in there. Cattermole has been tremendous this season, but he's not a physically domineering presence. All signs in January have to point towards getting someone who's a powerful, tall, box-to-box midfielder who chips in with a few goals. If I were the scouting bloke, everything would go into finding a poor man's Yaya Toure. Who are the star men and weak links in the side? There's not been a huge amount of star men as you might imagine from our league position, but one or two have stood out. The first might shock you if the weekend gone was the first time you've seen us but Simon Mignolet has really become the man this season. The mistakes against WBA were just one of them things, they happen to even the greatest keepers from time to time. This season though he's looked bigger, more confident and generally has won us a hell of a lot more points than he's lost us. Stephane Sessegnon is an obvious one, but he's stepped up his game in the last few weeks and really starting to look like the player which attracted so much attention last year. Ignore Steven Fletcher at your peril too. What is the opinion of the fans on the owner and board - he seems to invest a lot of money for little return on the field. What are the medium and long term aims? Are they attainable? We love him, and he seems to love the club too. He rarely speaks, and lets the football people do the football stuff and goes about his business. I don't think he's here to turn us into a business, he seems to genuinely enjoy watching us and has become a bona fide fan. The aims have to be to become regulars in the top ten without worry, looking to push on for European places. We can do that eventually. It just won't come over night as some might have hoped. Scout ReportPrior to Sunderland’s victory at Fulham a week ago, their lack of a cutting edge in attack was clear for all to see. They’d scored just seven goals in their first ten matches, five of them had been bagged by Stephen Fletcher and one was an own goal. Fletcher actually scored four of those with his first four shots of the season after joining in the summer from Wolves. In ten matches they’d had just 58 shots in total, and a pathetic 15 on target, which was the worst of any professional team anywhere in Europe. Not surprisingly, they had won just one of the previous 18 league games. At Craven Cottage they started with Fletcher alone in attack, but given that injury prone duo Fraizer Campbell and Louis Saha are the only other options available to O’Neill perhaps that’s not surprising. Behind him came a supporting cast of Adam Johnson, Sebastien Larsson and Stephane Sessegnon and it’s here that I believe their attacking problems lie. All three of those players are currently performing way, way below the level they have produced in the recent past. Last season Sessegnon was the outstanding Sunderland player in both games against QPR and looked a genuine threat, but prior to the Fulham game he hadn’t scored a goal in 22 appearances dating all the way back to the 3-1 win against Rangers in March. He broke that duck in the 3-1 win in West London last week, but still looked poor for most of the match to me. Johnson, too, has shown exactly why he didn’t get the game time many, including me, felt he deserved at Man City with his performances so far in a Sunderland shirt. If there was a lesson to take from their game with Fulham, it’s not to go down to ten men. Both their victories this season have come once the opposition have had a man sent off and once Brede Hangeland had been dismissed by referee Lee Probert Sunderland went on to win 3-1. That said they did concede an equaliser to the ten men initially, and only retook the lead when Fulham were reduced briefly to nine men by an injury.
The positives from a Sunderland point of view in that match came from the attitude and body language. There was certainly no shortage of effort and work rate as they pressed Fulham high up the field attempting to force both errors, and long balls up to Berbatov which their physical centre backs could cope with a good deal easier than balls worked into his feet. They were organised, and kept a good shape, but there was no threat before the sending off. Even when playing against ten men they were regularly only committing one or two men to attacks. They rarely got the ball into a wide area when going forwards at all, which I found really strange not only because that’s where Adam Johnson eats, but also because Martin O’Neill’s teams at Leicester, Villa and Celtic have always been known for having excellent wingers keen to deliver balls into the box – he got the best out of people like Steve Guppy, Ashley Young and Stewart Downing and now here he is playing without real wingers at all. Because of Fulham’s numerical disadvantage I sort of wrote the game off as a scouting exercise, and I did likewise with the West Brom game I saw at the weekend where Sunderland were well in the match and lost 4-2 because of two very poor pieces of goalkeeping from Simon Mignolet who’d actually been given Sky’s Man of the Match award the week before and can therefore justifiably say the first two he conceded at the weekend were out of character. This is an ideal game for a team with a new manager like QPR because a fast, positive start that the situation often brings could shatter brittle confidence and turn the home fans on their own team. However, Sunderland have plenty ready to take advantage of set piece situations which have troubled Rangers all season and given that corners and free kicks often look their best hope of scoring that should be a real cause for concern given the amateur way QPR are defending such situations at the moment. Links >>> Sunderland Official Website >>> Roker Report Blog >>> Ready to Go Forum >>> Into the Light Forum >>> A Love Supreme Fanzine Tweet @loftforwords Pictures – Action Images Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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