Worst Sacking of a Manager at Sunderland

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Wise Man Says said:
We’ll never know, but I reckon O’Neill would have taken us down. We were out of gas and ideas under him. One thing is for sure in my mind, we’d never have beaten the Mags the way we did under PDC. That match was pure PDC influence. His pre match slap of Pardew changed the mentality of the derby in an instant. We showed we weren’t being dicked around by that lot any more
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Yeah I agree the 3-0 smacked of new manager bounce.

But in retrospect wouldn’t O’Neill have only needed 4 points from 7 games or something to keep us up?
 


Can’t think of a time (Reid era onwards) when one of our managers hasn’t deserved to be sacked when they were. O’Neill’s was unexpected but the football had been abysmal all season. No ambition in the team’s play whatsoever.
 
citybythesea said:
Might seem controversial but Peter Reid......

We werent even in the PL bottom three when he was fired

It sent us in a backwards spiral

the board and the fans were wrong about this one
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Got plenty to thank him for but if we had a football savvy ownership (which we’ve never had) at the time he should’ve been sacked in the summer of 2002 after we’d just finished 17th. He stayed and spent more than £20m on mostly rubbish.
 
NorthCountryBoy said:
Yeah I agree the 3-0 smacked of new manager bounce.

But in retrospect wouldn’t O’Neill have only needed 4 points from 7 games or something to keep us up?
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He needed 5 points. We were to play against relegation candidates like Stoke, Southampton, Villa and the mags, plus Everton at home. We were in a bad run, but we would've styed up with him imo. Hardly a miracle from PDC.
 
If the club had just accepted a relegation rather than sacking managers all the time under Short the club would not have ended up In the state it did!
 
Moneyball said:
PDC was left high and dry by the clubs hierarchy but he was bat shot crazy. Don’t think he tried to rule by fear though, he simply wanted the players to be professional.

On Ferguson though, he did rule the young kids by fear but even then he recruited a whole raft of lieutenants throughout his tenure that ran the dressing room and set the standards. He was the stick at the end of the that.

He knew how to psychologically put a dressing room together that would rule itself and spit out the weak...his powers waned when money and agents changed the game.
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Not so sure his powers waned - he did win the league in his final season.
 
Houghtoner said:
Got plenty to thank him for but if we had a football savvy ownership (which we’ve never had) at the time he should’ve been sacked in the summer of 2002 after we’d just finished 17th. He stayed and spent more than £20m on mostly rubbish.
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He probably assembled his best teams on a modest budget when you consider how good some players were then: Schwarz, Rae, Hutchinson , McCann were all £1m -£5m
Phillips was £300k. Obviously had some terrible signings too
But I think this level of spending was right for us given what has happened to the club since we’ve £8m -£15m players.........ie we’ve ended up in debt paying for mercenary ineffective players
 
Shields26 said:
What sacking of a Sunderland Manager over the years do you think has been the worst/most ill timed etc. I was proper gutted as a young un when Tom Cowie sacked Ken Knighton and then Alan Durban but realise now it was all part of being a Sunderland fan
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Durban by a country mile. Biggest act of shooting yourself in foot ever.

Give a mention to Poyet albeit under Short trying to manage in such a dysfunctional organisation meant no one was ever going to be successful
 
Durban
Good to see him in the Black Cats recently v Bristol Rovers
Still a lot of affection from everyone which was great to see
Shame - he should have been given longer
 
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northernlight said:
Not so sure his powers waned - he did win the league in his final season.
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Despite that win I think it was pretty obvious that his control over the dressing room wasn’t as strong as in the past.

He himself intimated that the game had changed when retiring the first time. Only came back to wait for Moyes to be his successor, that went well.
 
palm 1 said:
I thought at the time that Dennis Smith could have been a successful manager and was sacked too early. Time clouds your judgement like.
I’m more recent times. I liked Poyet and thought he got us playing some decent stuff .
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Perhaps Poyet for me too. We lost some key players from the side which finished 13/14 so strongly and replaced them with inferior players so he was hard done by on that front.

Having said that I wasn’t shedding any tears when he was shown the door.
 
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