Well it certainly developed into an interesting pre-season that’s for sure from the perspective of us Sunderland supporters.
Niall Quinn, backed by his Drumaville consortium, promised that we would no longer be routing around for players that are not up to the task of playing for this great club of ours and on our promotion a lot of people starting dreaming of the likes of Van Nistelrooy, Forlan, O’Shea or Silvestre being enticed to play for us by their old friend Roy Keane with these funds available to him to get the best.
In reality though, that was never ever going to happen at this stage of our Drumaville Development.
The simple fact is that previous campaigns in the Premiership have caused a lot of damage to the reputation of the club. Fresh in the memory of course is the 15 points season, and even before that we only managed a paltry 19 points. What do people honestly think the perceptions of the club are after them two disastrous attempts at relative success?
Even before those campaigns despite finishing in seventh place in two seasons, which should have been the impetus to build on, we damaged our reputation more than anything. Despite having solid foundations there, and despite being in the top 3 at Christmas in both seasons we continually talked of safety and we did talk up our ambitions to enhance the reputation of our club.
In football “talking the talk”, can at times be as important as “walking the walk” as they say.
So, we are approaching our return to the Premier League with the first aim being to put solid foundations in place and get ourselves a foothold on which to take the club forward before we can even dream of attracting the higher profile players. Attracting them players has to be about more than just throwing millions of pounds their way as signing for the money is no way to build.
In his first press conference of the season Roy Keane stated that it would be easy for him to spend £10m or £20m for him to grab a headline, and that he knows some clubs do that. He is there to build and not for short term success or bragging rights.
Rumour has it that Niall Quinn was given advice by a certain David Dein to not be afraid to make decisions that the supporters don’t like as you can never keep them all happy and you don’t succeed by being popular.
We’re within touching distance of the big kick off against Spurs, we’ve got major changes on the playing front and of course one of those was a British Record Breaking Transfer for Craig Gordon from Hearts, with possibly more to follow, and despite the lack of so called big names the intentions of the club now under the consortium cannot be doubted and we all need to be fighting as one right from the off.
Let’s get the season started on a positive note and start heading in the right direction finally.
