The transformation in Sunderland’s season since the appointment of Martin O’Neill has been remarkable and could yet end at Wembley in the FA Cup final.

Overview

New manager syndrome is a strange affliction.

In 2006 Super League team Hull FC lost a league match against the Leeds Rhinos at Headingly. It was their sixth defeat from seven competitive games which included an early exit from the Challenge Cup competition they’d successfully won the season before. Lifting that trophy was supposed to be the catalyst for the black and white side of Kingston upon Hull to once again become a powerful force in the English game as they had been during the 1980s but whatever reason that same squad of players, with extra reinforcements, returned for the following season in no mood to do anything much other than sink pints and lose rugby matches.

So, with a heavy heart, the board fired head coach John Kear; a popular, likeable man who’d worked wonders for the club and brought it actual silverware for the first time in more than a decade the season before. While the board of directors negotiated the finer points of a deal to bring Australian coach Peter Sharp in as his replacement Hull suddenly dragged a performance and positive result out of nowhere in an away game at Huddersfield. Then they beat Wakefield. And Catalans. And Wigan, Bradford and Leeds. Then they beat Huddersfield again, and Salford, and St Helens, and London. In fact they beat everybody. They couldn’t stop beating teams. They won 13 consecutive matches, lost one, and then won the next four.

From looking at a possible relegation Hull ended up finishing second and contesting a grand final. And Peter Sharp wasn’t even that good a coach. He was just new.

Unless you’re Mark Hughes and/or QPR you can expect some sort of new manager syndrome to strike whenever a club makes that change at the top. Players who’d given up hope of being in the team suddenly find the slate wiped clean so up their performances, players who knew they were pretty secure in the line up start to put a bit more in to make sure they stay there, the formation and tactics changes, the voice is new – a change is as good as a rest as they say. But it’s especially potent when either the previous incumbent wasn’t very good at their job, or the players had clearly stopped caring very much or playing for him, or the new manager is a really exceptional appointment.

At Hull FC it was the middle one, the players had just decided they didn’t like John Kear any more. At Sunderland this season it’s actually all three which is a perfect storm that may yet see them at Wembley lifting the FA Cup having looked Championship bound before Martin O’Neill replaced Steve Bruce in November.

I mention Hull FC not only because I’m a supporter and reported on every match they played that fateful season but because it’s almost a carbon copy of what has happened this year at the Stadium of Light. Exactly the same group of players who, in Sunderland’s case, had just lost at home to Wigan in farcical circumstances were suddenly able to take on all comers.

The trend this season has been to tell people like me who occasionally question the effort and work rate of footballers that they do care, are committed and give it their absolute best in every game. Bollocks. You only have to look at Sunderland to see it’s not the case. A set of players that couldn’t string two passes together one week suddenly looked like potential Europa League qualifiers the next. O’Neill is good, but he’s not that good.

I’m not about to start sympathising with Steve Bruce. The player turnover during his two and a half years in charge on Wearside was astronomical; 22 players signed at a cost of just shy of £74m, 34 out to the tune of £65.75m plus whatever we paid for Anton Ferdinand. The upshot of all this activity was a team with no left side and no attack which really is quite astonishing for a manager of Bruce’s experience. I’m sure he would point to extenuating circumstances – how could he know what would happen with Asamoah Gyan after he’d sold Darren Bent for big money for instance? Or that Titus Bramble would once again fall foul of the law within weeks of Anton Ferdinand leaving?

But it’s that left hand side of the team that is the saddest indictment of Bruce’s reign. How can you be involved in 56 player transactions and end up with a team that can only attack down one side of the field? He’s clearly keen to get back into work, because he’s started appearing in sycophantic double page newspaper features with a big picture of him looking wistfully out over the extensive grounds of his house and quotes that are starting to hint at perhaps blaming the Sunderland fans for what happened to him.

They’re a fickle and hard to please bunch in this part of the world in my experience, and their treatment of Bruce was both extreme and often directed more at his Newcastle roots than his actual inability to do the job, but don’t let Bruce kid you just yet. A manager I’ve always rated, and who has performed admirably elsewhere, got this job badly wrong with all the tools he could have needed at his disposal and the fact that even Wolves went for Terry Connor rather than appoint him tells its own story. Beware, behind every newspaper feature is a PR company and agent talking up somebody who would benefit from such a piece.

So step forward Martin O’Neill. He claims to have supported the club as a youngster, and tells an engaging tale of a recent late night drive around the town hunting for where Roker Park used to be to the bemusement of the locals he asked for directions. How much of that is true is open to question, but what cannot be denied is he’s walked into a splendid situation here. The fans love him because he’s not Steve Bruce, the money is there to strengthen the squad, the infrastructure is second to none, and the Premiership is now in a state where for every away game with Man Utd there’s a home match with Bolton and clubs like Spurs, Fulham, Norwich, Swansea and Newcastle have made inroads at the upper end of the table that wouldn’t have been possible a few seasons ago. There is no reason why Sunderland cannot now follow suit.

What Sunderland have needed, really from the day they arrived back in this division, is a strong and experienced manager who has a clearly defined and refined style of play and system that he knows and has worked in the past. Somebody a notoriously demanding set of supporters can get behind and welcome into the club without concerns about any latent connections with the city of Newcastle. Somebody with a track record of getting the very best out of every player and penny he has at his disposal.

Quite why it took them as long as it did to appoint Martin O’Neill is a mystery to me.

Interview

Simon Walsh from The Roker Report returns to LoftforWords for the second time this season with his thoughts on Sunderland's current situation.

Rarely has a season turned around as dramatically as Sunderland 's this year. Was Bruce that bad? Is O'Neill that good? Is it a bit of both?

Bit of both really. Bruce was that bad, and O'Neill is that good. Contrary to what Bruce has been blabbing on about in the press recently, the fact we all wanted him gone had nothing to do with his roots or allegiances. It was more the fact we were playing terribly, he blamed everyone but himself and, well, which manager in world football would survive the chop after three home wins in a calendar year?

What has O'Neill changed? He doesn't seem to have made a lot of signings.

Further proves Bruce's ineptitude really. We knew there were good players there. Seb Larsson, Craig Gardner, John O'Shea, Wes Brown... these are quality players, added to what was already a good side being mismanaged. O'Neill's brought a new style to us, and got us playing the game in much more simple terms. Everyone knows their role, sticks to it, and lets everyone else worry about their own jobs rather than over-complicating things. It's simple but effective at the minute.

Is this an extended honeymoon period that will soon subside or can Sunderland become a genuine contender for cups and European football over the coming years?

Well we're hoping to be a genuine contender for a cup this season, despite what the bookies think as they still have us as outsiders. As for European football, I think it might be out of reach in the league until we make a few more improvements, but it's not a wildly unrealistic expectation in the next year or two. I'd be happy for next season to be like this one. A long cup run and a top ten finish.

Who have been the star performers and weak links in the side this season?

Difficult to say. The whole defensive unit have been solid over the last month or two, and John O'Shea in particular has been an absolute beast, so we should be fairly difficult to break down. Over the course of the season though, our missing trio of the last few weeks have been possibly our best performers - Sessegnon, Cattermole and Richardson who have all been excellent. Thankfully for this game we have Sessegnon back from suspension.

As results will show you, we haven't really had any weak links since O'Neill came in, but I'd say James McClean and Seb Larsson have been slightly down on their own exceptionally high standards in the last few weeks, while Wayne Bridge is still a somewhat unknown quantity if he plays.

Tell us a bit about James Mclean who wasn't in the side under Bruce but has been superb since O'Neill came in.

It came as quite a shock to be honest. I'd heard good things about him from those who regularly go to reserve games about him, but remained sceptical given we'd been burned on signings from Ireland in the past such as Roy O'Donovan and Daryl Murphy. McClean though has taken to the Premier League like a duck to water. He's very much an old-fashioned winger. He sticks to the byline, looks to get crosses in early and has a wizard of a left foot. One of the overlooked parts of his game though is his tracking back. He must cover more of the pitch than any other player, and you can't knock that sort of commitment.

An interesting aside on this which you might enjoy as QPR fans is that he could have ended up at Chelsea . We nicked Pop Robson a scout of theirs who was very high on McClean, however Chelsea deemed him not high profile enough to sign. When Robson came to us, we signed him almost immediately based on his recommendation.

QPR have suddenly found themselves awash with former Sunderland players. What is your opinion, and the general feeling among Sunderland fans, about Anton Ferdinand, Nedum Onuoha and Djibril Cisse?

I think they're all well liked. Or they certainly are by me anyway. Anton always gave his best for the club despite some ups and downs, and at the time you signed him, I wanted him to stay, but could understand that the money was too good to turn down for a player who was out of contract at the end of the season. He seemed to have a great connection with the fans too.

Nedum Onuoha was the one who perhaps split opinions the most, but I liked him. His versatility would have made him a very useful squad player at the club, and it's a shame he didn't want to continue his career at SAFC, but obviously if you guys were in a position to offer more money and first team football, he made the right choice. Ned was always solid if unspectacular for us.

Cisse was a real fans favourite, as is anyone who scores against Newcastle I suppose. Obviously he's no wallflower, and that endeared him to the Wearside faithful. I think anyone likes a player who gets upset when things aren't going his way, gets excited when he scores and generally shows some emotions. A good player, I'd have had him back here at the price you paid for him.

If all three start at the weekend, I'm sure they'll get a round of applause when their names are read out.

Hopes for this season, and aims in the medium and long term?

Hopes for this season? Make the FA Cup Final, and finish as high as we can in the league. Best not to make targets on that though and just see what happens. Medium? Sustained top ten/top eight finishes and in the long term be a regular contender for European football. Hopefully make step up in the way someone like Tottenham have, but those days are a long way off.

Thanks to Simon for his input into our site this season, it's been much appreciated. Obviously we hope we're speaking to him next year as well but, well, meh….

Manager

The delay seemed to be down to a dispute over settlement money with his previous employers Aston Villa, who he walked out on just a fortnight before the start of last season. I’ve heard it said that Villa fans weren’t that unhappy to see the back of him – citing his failure to push them beyond the sixth to eighth bracket he consistently had them finishing in and a less than inspiring style of play. If that is true, they’re idiots.

Nobody had done as well at Villa before O’Neill for many a long year and you only have to look at what’s happened since he left to see what a difference he makes. Last season, with O’Neill’s team plus Darren Bent but without O’Neill, Villa were battling to stay away from the bottom three. This season it’s much the same. No, as far as I’m concerned, he did as well at Villa as anybody could do or is likely to do again for some considerable time.

As a player O’Neill captained Northern Ireland and won more than 60 caps, at club level he spent ten years with Nottingham Forest and won the European Cup and First Division title under Brian Clough. He later clocked up more than 50 matches for Norwich and Notts County but was troubled by a knee injury that forced him to retire before he could play in the 1986 World Cup.

He managed in non-league with first Grantham and then Shepshed Charterhouse but it was at Wycombe where he really made his name, guiding them into the Football League for the first time in their history by winning the Conference in 1992/93 and then taking them straight through the Third Division to the Second via a play off final win against Preston at Wembley. He also won two FA Trophy titles with the Chairboys as well before leaving to join Norwich in 1995.

Norwich were then under the chairmanship of Robert Chase, widely disliked by the supporters of the club and, as it turned out, O’Neill as well. Their relationship lasted barely five months at which point, angry that the chairman had vetoed a £750,000 move for Dean Windass from Hull, O’Neill resigned on the morning of an away game at Leicester and promptly joined the Foxes to replace Mark McGhee who’d left for Wolves. He’d turned down a chance to go to Leicester a year before to stay at Wycombe and see if an unlikely third straight promotion could be miraculously won.

At Leicester he achieved four consecutive top ten finishes in the Premiership, two League Cup wins and another League Cup final appearance. He subsequently bossed Celtic where he won the SPL three times, the Scottish Cup three times and the Scottish League Cup once. He also took them to a UEFA Cup Final – a remarkable achievement when you consider just how God awful Scottish football really is. At Villa he finished sixth in the Premiership for three years in a row and again reached a League Cup Final in 2010. Tellingly none of Leicester, Celtic or Villa have done as well since he left.

When he’s not improving his managerial record O’Neill has spent time in television studios where his appearance is akin to engaging and encouraging the mad bloke who sits in the corner of every pub in the country chittering on while the other regulars ignore him. But while Alan Hanson criticises every defence, Lee Dixon states the bleeding obvious and Alan Shearer says nothing of any worth at all O’Neill, when he can get his point out, is always engaging with his football chat. He’ll often have spotted something in the game that the rest of the panel has missed or, more tellingly, disagree with all of them totally – a good sign in my book.

He’s the manager every club outside the top four should want, and Sunderland have pulled off a masterstroke to get him.

Scout Report

The stat kicking around today about Sunderland only managing four shots on target in the three games that Stephane Sessegnon was suspended for should give QPR a clue as to where their priorities should lie for this game. Sadly, from our point of view, the Benin born forward returns from his ban this weekend.

Sessegnon was signed in the summer from Paris SG and took a little time to settle; indeed when I watched Sunderland at Norwich earlier in the season he was very average despite his team mates looking for him with every forward pass. But he’s been excellent for the past few months, his form changing with the appointment of Martin O’Neill like so many of his team mates.

At Newcastle when he last played the home team focussed on getting tight to him quickly, often with two men, to prevent him turning and hurting them. A high tempo, high pressing game restricted the service to Sessegnon and his partner Nicklas Bendtner and not only frustrated the striker into getting sent off, but also made Sunderland look as ordinary as I’ve seen them under O’Neill. That said, the frantic and gratuitously violent nature of that game made it a difficult one to scout.

In attack though Newcastle’s narrow approach to the game forced them into going long to their two strikers Ba and Cisse which was completely ineffective and despite being a long way from their best, and playing for the last half hour with ten men, Sunderland should still have won the game. Going long or direct to Zamora and Cisse simply won’t yield results for QPR tomorrow and they cannot afford for that front two to be as isolated as they were against Liverpool. The only time Newcastle did look really threatening was from corners where Sunderland operate a zonal marking system with defenders strung out along the edge of the six yard box – it was a disaster at St James Park and they were fortunate not to concede to Ba and Coloccini. If Hughes is minded to keep picking Joey Barton for God’s sake don’t let him take the corners, it might be our best hope of a goal.

Sunderland looked for Sessegnon so often that night at Norwich, regardless of his form at the time, because he was playing on the right side of the attack and for all the money spent and players traded Steve Bruce never did manage to find anybody who could play left wing for him. Considering 22 players came in and 34 left during Bruce’s time it’s a damning indictment that the squad was left without a designated left winger at the end of it and O’Neill recognised immediately that there entire set up was hopelessly lopsided.

Personally I would have made bringing in a left back my first priority so that Kieron Richardson could move forward from that position into the left wing role that he’d previously excelled in so much he won England caps. But instead the new manager made Bruce look even more ridiculous by finding a solution to the problem immediately kicking around in the reserve team, a player Bruce had brought to the club would you believe. James McLean, a 22-year-old signed from Derry City in the summer, slotted straight in there and has been a revelation so far. He’s like Sunderland’s version of Jamie Mackie – raw in every sense of the word, built like an outside toilet, unfeasibly hard working, nuggety and a constant irritant to opponents.

On the other side they have Seb Larsson, whose set pieces and crosses from wide areas in open play are second to none. Whoever plays left back must focus on shutting down space in wide areas to stop those crosses, as Middlesbrough’s Joe Bennett did successfully when I saw the two face each other in a recent FA Cup tie, while Luke Young or Nedum Onuoha must prepare for an afternoon of running the hard yards. If Mark Hughes persists with this ridiculous three man midfield set up he’s used in the last two games then few teams are better equipped to take advantage of the resulting two on one situations in wide areas than Sunderland.

The absence of Cattermole is key. Stupidly sent off at Newcastle, widely disliked, but playing extremely well this season and a possibility for England in the summer if only his reputation and behaviour was better. It has left Sunderland weak in the centre of midfield but again I come back to the importance of ditching this ridiculous midfield set up we’re currently operating with if we want to take advantage.

Finally, as I tend to end on the penalties, Bendtner took the one they won at Newcastle (their first of the season surprisingly) and scored but homework on his kicks is tricky – he’s scored his last four, two on each side in no discernible pattern. At the other end goalkeeper Simon Mignolet saved one from Ba down low to his left.

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N12Hoop added 00:12 - Mar 24 Might be a hazy memory on this one, but when we played them at home I don't recall them being particularly good (except for Sessegnon) and don't think we deserved to be 2-0 down. After clawing it back to 2-2 their late winner whilst unsurprising was difficult to take and set the scene for the dreadful run we have had. We have a lot more quality now, but whether we can get the midfield right is another question. If we can compete better there and get some better linkplay with Cisse and Zamora then all things are possible.

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