Martin O'Neill - Is he past his best?

Good of you to accept it but well played for giving us some competition this season for once. Its been too easy to be top dogs for the last 3 on the trot.

Let the competition for this years top dogs start now maybe? Who knows?

 

agree

 

Certain people are really going to look like complete tits if O'Neill does a good job.

 

Dream Boat

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I love it when Sunderland fans delude themselves into thinking it's mainly Bruce that's ****ed up their season so far, not their players.

They have a great potential in whickham, but he's going to take a couple of seasons to get up to speed. Bendtner is ****e. He has the odd great game, but apart from that he's a 6ft 5 streak of piss. Ji looks even weaker than Lovenkrands. They have no massive threat up front, which has definitely contributed to their poor start.

In midfield they have Sessegnon who's a great player but doesn't score or produce quality final balls enough, and he's their best player, according to the mackems. And he wants out.

Larsson is a great player. After that they don't really have that much.

Cattermole and Colback are average. Vaughan isn't much better.

At the back you'd look at their defense on paper and say it's quite solid, but Brown and Oshea are clearly past their best. Rapist Bramble... haha. They have a great fullback in Bardsley though.

I think they are potentially better than their current league position shows, but I still don't think they would be great odds to finish in the top 10.

I'd give the 7th-9th spots to us, Everton and Villa, after that I'd say there's Swansea, Qpr, Norwich, WBA and Stoke, who are on the same level as Sunderland.

Face it Mackems, it wasn't just the manager, Sunderland don't have a certain top 10 team. They are top 10 contenders yes, but I wouldn't put anything on them finishing in the to 10.

 

exactly

I'd love nothing more than north east football being as successful as the north west teams,christ this area's built for it but the majority have DJ bruces mentality of beating the neighbours at all costs.

Example being 'yeah our record is 9-1 ' well we won the league that year so you could stuff us 10 -0 this year if it meant we won the league for me .

 

That is sweet of them

 

Don't worry. I reversed the charges so Cest had to pay

 

can't agree with that every game i've seen Brown has been outstanding and their best player

 

This question wouldn't even be being asked if he wasn't Sunderland manager, he'll be fine, or at least a huge improvement on Bruce

 

Football is a funny old game.

We have scored the same amount of goals as this time last season, we have let in 2 more goals than this time last season, yet we are languishing at the bottom and not top 6 like we were this time last season.

A couple of wins and this season will totally turn around, a couple of defeats though and we are still in the **** and probably bottom 3, but its a marathon over 38 games, not a sprint, so anything can happen yet.

 

He's not the Sunderland manager, yet!.

No, if he wasn't in the running for the job I wouldn't have given his career a second glance.

He is though, so I did. ...

 

Not really. What part of what he said is unreasonable?

I think O'Neill will do well for you, probably finishing in the top half consistently. But at least we might get a decent game from now on on derby days!

 

sorry i thought it had already happened

yeh well obviously none of us would be interested if he had nothing to do with anything but what i ment was i didn't think any of us woud be doubting him, I certainly don't anyway but you guys have made a couple of decent points so it would be interesting to see how he'd do

 

Though he did cost them two points against Wigan, and probably Bruce his job.

 

Which to some makes him a bloody god lol (getting Bruce the sack) but it was as much Westwoods fault as it was Browns for me.

 

Don't think Dalglish has done particularly well tbh given that he spent 100m on new players. He certainly didn't do particularly well for us in his time here (got to a cup final but really poor in the league).

 

i didn't see that match

 

I'm sure he'll do a decent enough job. Look at what Pardew has managed. A lot of preparation, plenty of drilling, and a dose of confidence can turn many a team around. I mean we're 4th for crying out loud. Who'd have thought that at the beginning of the season? It won't last, but it's still going to be a better season than pretty much everyone predicted. If MON brings some of the same, there's no reason why the mackems can't improve substantially. I'd be shocked if things don't improve greatly, but there's always hope.

 

I wouldn't really call 6th place with an incredibly expensive squad and almost 80million quid worth of players sitting on the bench as particularly good, to be honest. The team is doing well, but it's an expensive team with some very good players, so it will do well by default unless Dalglish ****s it up.

Plus, to be honest, I think Dalglish's purchases have reflected how he's been out of the loop for so long and lost some grip on the market. Instead of having a wide scope of knowledge of the modern market and conducting some research, he seems to have just opted for the 'next big thing' with the most buzz around them in the media - Henderson and Carroll. It just smacks of someone who has been watching the news and listening to hear-say instead of actually being in the thick of it.

Read carefully son. No one is slagging O'Neill off, or at least I'm not. All I'm saying is that after 15 months out of the game, he MAY be a little rusty coming back and getting into the swing of things, and MAY not have an instantly positive impact.

It's a very reasonable notion.