Did Peter Reid get it wrong after 1999 promotion..


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I was always surprised that we never went in for Tim Cahill back in the day. Only cost Everton somewhere in the region of 300k and caused us problems a few times.

I think Reidy's Del boy dealing came back to bite him in the end. There was a lot of shady deals going on back then from a lot of managers in footy.....they seen it was their little bit on the side. Unfortunately, I think a few took their eye off the ball when it came to the actual football side of things.

Mental that those top 7 finishes along with the team were the best it's been at the club. I could throw Roy's promotion season in there too, but it's been pretty f#cking pathetic when you think of how big we are and yet how embarrassing poorly we've been run over the past few decades.
 
Quinn actually wrote about this in the Guardian newspaper, he said that "the slide happened because of 2 transfers that didn't happen, and one that did".

He said both Makele (!) and Sinclair had agreed to come, fees agreed with their clubs, and they were in wearside negotiating terms.
Whilst Hutchison had had a stellar season, and had come home to the NE even though SAFC offered him the lowest wages of the 3 deals he was offered - with the club saying they would renegotiate if things went well.

Murray wouldn't sanction the wages for Sinclair or Makele, and wouldn't renegotiate with Hutchy, so all 3 left, while basically sent out a signal that we wouldn't pay the going rate.

Makele signed for Chelsea the next season, Sinclair moved on, and Hutchinson doubled his wages at WH but absolutely trashed his knee with a serious injury.

I'd take what he says with a pinch of salt mind.

Timelines don't add up with Makelele, IIRC we tried to sign him the summer he went to Real Madrid.
 
The big problem with Reid was mentality

He had a small tight knit team of people around him, with the same ideas and shared vision. That worked well for the first few seasons.

But after a while we needed new ideas, new thinking and Reid wouldn't accept that. Anyone who tried to suggested new ideas was immediately sidelined - Thomas Helmer for example

It was that failure to move on in their thinking that led to his downfall
 
The big problem with Reid was mentality

He had a small tight knit team of people around him, with the same ideas and shared vision. That worked well for the first few seasons.

But after a while we needed new ideas, new thinking and Reid wouldn't accept that. Anyone who tried to suggested new ideas was immediately sidelined - Thomas Helmer for example

It was that failure to move on in their thinking that led to his downfall
Completely agree. You only have to watch Premier Passions, it is drilled home about 20 times per episode that we needed a striker, cut to Reid - "won't settle for second best, won't overpay for someone who isn't worth the money, I'll do it my way".

Reidy is a legend and gave us brilliant times but he was incredibly stubborn. The more calls for him to do one thing or another, the more he dug his heels in. He built a hardworking team and instilled a work hard, play hard attitude which fostered a brilliant team spirit, but football was changing and he refused to adapt.

We can get hung up on not strengthening when we were flying but to me that only explains why we fell from 2nd to 7th, not why we fell from 2nd to 17th in 18 months and eventually relegated with 19 points up to our eyeballs in debt.

Within 3 years we had frozen out or sold the following:

Makin
Summerbee
Johnston
Bridges
Clark
Schwarz
Hutchison
Rae

In their place we signed Thome, Arca and Reyna (successes), but also the likes of:

McAteer
Haas
Babb
Bjorklund
Fredgaard
Kilbane
Nunez
Flo
Stewart
Mercimek
Peeters
Laslandes
Wright
Piper


It's not so much about not strengthening, more actively dismantling the squad and replacing them with dross that contributed nothing. Reid can blame Murray for the extension as much as he likes but he became arrogant and surrounded himself with yes men. He was phoning it in for his last 18 months here
 
Completely agree. You only have to watch Premier Passions, it is drilled home about 20 times per episode that we needed a striker, cut to Reid - "won't settle for second best, won't overpay for someone who isn't worth the money, I'll do it my way".
Aye, he got pulled on it one of the latter episodes and he's rattling off teams around us splashing the cash (think West ham might have signed a couple of forwards?) and finishes with "we will finish above all of them". We didn't, and got relegated as a result :lol:
 
Summer of 2001 we lost Hutchison, Makin had already gone and wasn’t replaced, even letting Alex Rae go was a bad move I thought. Quinn was starting to fade but we still played the same and Laslandes barely featured. Even though we didn’t go down I remember 2001/2002 being one of the worst seasons. After two 7th finished it was so deflating and the football was diabolical.

People say that, and yet at New Year 2002 we were 10th in the league, so not too shabby at all albeit still a backwards step from 7th (although we were only 4 pts off it). To then go and finish 17th we must’ve had a disastrous second half of the season. What the fuck happened?! Mind you we also had post Christmas blips in our two 7th place finish seasons, quite an intriguing pattern.

Here’s the table at New Year 2002: https://www.11v11.com/league-tables/premier-league/01-january-2002/
 
People say that, and yet at New Year 2002 we were 10th in the league, so not too shabby at all albeit still a backwards step from 7th (although we were only 4 pts off it). To then go and finish 17th we must’ve had a disastrous second half of the season. What the fuck happened?! Mind you we also had post Christmas blips in our two 7th place finish seasons, quite an intriguing pattern.

Here’s the table at New Year 2002: https://www.11v11.com/league-tables/premier-league/01-january-2002/
Fair enough forget about that. Second half of the season was where we really bombed. Think it was a home defeat to Boro where someone threw a shirt at Reid in the dugout.
 
Don't think there's much doubt that Reidy started to believe his own hype. He'd focussed on his belief that it should all be about playing for your team mates and having a tight bond whilst getting leathered in Romano's... forgetting that our success also relied on two very special players who gelled in a quite unbelievable way - Quinn & Phillips.

The biggest contributor to our downfall was Quinny's aging body. He'd been battered over the last 3-4 seasons and couldn't go on forever. We couldn't replace him and when we started signing players like Laslandes and Flo it was evident that Reidy didn't know HOW to replace him in terms of the impact on our playing style.

Whilst they'd had a great relationship, by nature Murray was a tight, very financially-cautious man - while Reidy was a show-off who wanted to spend and go after (what he saw) as the best. I think his recruitment had generally been sound but players wages were really taking off and I can't imagine Murray wanted to give in and end up renegotiating contracts right across the squad.

The Flo transfer was sheer desperation and the beginning of the end for him. I think Murray rightly judged that Reidy had lost his magic and we needed a change. That he brought Howard f***ing Wilkinson in instead though was probably the worst decision he ever made whilst owner.
 
He got found out once the Quinn and Phillips partnership broke up. The tit also let stubbornness dismantle a team. His treatment of Summerbee and Makin was disgraceful. Mind, he had history, just look at when he dropped Kubicki for Hall, then pretended he didn't know the significance.

Mind, those four seasons, ending with the second of the two 7th place funishes were fantastic. Going to every game knowing you had a chance no matter the opposition was class.

Great times but the game left him behind.
His tendency to fall out with players, certainly did us, nor him, any favours.
As you correctly point out, Makin, Sumerbee and Kubicki were all frozen out by Reid, as was Johnston and Bridges.
The way he denied Dariusz, the chance to equal or break, George Mulhall's consecutive appearances record, was an absolute disgrace.
I met Kubicki at a reserve game at New Ferens Park, shortly after he'd bizarrely been dropped by Reid, and to say he (Dariusz) was disappointed, is a total understatement.
To this day, I don't think he's ever forgiven Reid.
I remember being really frustrated by the whole Hutchison signing.

The first season we came up, we were flying, we were trying to sign him before the transfer deadline. Don't remember the figures exactly but Everton wanted something like £2.75m and we were bidding something like £1.5m. So we didn't sign him until the following season and paid about £2.5m. Although 7th sounds like a good finish, we actually fell away at the end up the season and I've we'd paid just that little but more the bring in Hutchison half a season earlier it might have helped us kick on, he really made a big impact when he did come in.

Was also really frustrating to have frozen out Alan Johnston because he wouldn't renew his contract, and seem to remember a reluctance to play Summerbee even though he'd done so well to get us up.

Then it didn't help when we started signing players like Helmer and Medina but not playing them.
The gall of Reid, to freeze Johnston out, because he was in a contract dispute.
The same hypocritical Peter Reid, who went on strike as a player, to force a move from Bolton Wanderers, to Everton. :rolleyes:
 
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Couldn't get the required quality players to sign. Plus the finance wasn't there to over pay and force the deals home. Subsequently we signed players who were not good enough to take us forward and we ended up slipping back over at an alarming rate.
It was all about finance to be able to bring quality players in to continue developing, and we all know where that leads (or led).
in 1958 we were the only club never to have kicked a ball outside of the top flight of English football.
At that 1958 time only us and Arsenal had never been out of the top division.
 
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Imagine a midfield of Makelele and Hutchison for us. 🥲

I always used to rate Trevor Sinclair when I was a kid, he was one of my favourite non-SAFC players for some bizarre reason. I would have absolutely loved it if we’d signed him.

Me too.
It still feels mad typing his name out because of what he went on to achieve.
 
Should have signed John Hartson to replace Quinny. Should have had Reidy on a closer leash. However, at the end of the day, Sir Bob Murray was brilliant for the club. Easy to point out in hindsight
Agreed, we should of targeted mostly British players we had a chance of signing like Hartson, Keane, Sinclair with the odd good foreign player like schwarz and arca, even adding just 1-2 of these players to the existing squad would of been good enough I think
 
The premier league was starting to see high quality players from outside the UK being attracted to come here. Prior to this they were playing in Italy and Spain rather than England. IMHO we had a really poor network of scouts outside of the UK, so struggled to take advantage of this and combining that with Reid's stubborn nature we were left behind. Look at the likes of West Ham and others who were very active in bringing in foreign players. Those we did sign were either from other UK teams, or supposed up and coming players.
 
Should have gave Hutchison billions to play up with Phillips for a few more years.
Watching that team week in and out, Hutchison was clearly a very good player - and oddly, ocassionally underrated in pub conversation about our past players and I don't understand why.
 
The ground extension and Bob not being able to compete in the transfer market / get additional investment in, blew it


I think our foreign market transfers were poor as well. He'd built a core of predominantly English/British players that ''got' Sunderland and would fit his style of play.

As the turn of the millennium sorta 2000 came into 2001 we started to sign unproven European players to try and get better value for money and in typical Sunderland fashion we made a mess of most of them.

The likes of Carsten Fredgaard, Tom Peeters, Bernt Haas, Baki Mercimek, Nicolas Medina, Lillian Laslandes, Jocki Bjorklund, Eric Roy... i've probably missed one or two, hardly any value for money there.. Flo was a massive flop for £7m or whatever we paid.

We'd have been better off signing less but prioritising quality. I remember we were linked with Robbie Keane, Trevor Sinclair, Ray Parlour... them type of players would have been better.

All hindsight now mind but it was a big missed opportunity.
 
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I always thought we should have gone for Duncan Ferguson as a replacement for Quinn. I’m sure we were linked in the papers a few times. Think he went to the scum while we were still in Div 1 so the timelines didn’t really work plus we had another good season and a half out of Quinn before he started to fade. Dichio was obviously intended to step up but sadly he wasn’t good enough.
 
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