Sunderland Tries to Steady Itself and Emerge From Premier League Cellar SUNDERLAND, England — On the eve of his first game in English soccer’s most hapless job, Gus Poyet thought it best to begin by telling reporters who he wasn’t. At a glance, the men share a host of similarities. Poyet is the new manager of Sunderland, one of England’s oldest and most passionately supported clubs, but one currently locked in the Premier League’s cellar, last after seven games of the 38-game season, and transfixed by fear of the financial and sporting oblivion that would accompany relegation from the league next spring. Di Canio is the man Poyet replaced, fired last month after nine tumultuous months of a stewardship that an executive at one of his former clubs described as “management by hand grenade.” Both Poyet and di Canio were charismatic players with some of Europe’s most famous teams. Both are 45 and came to Britain as adults, Poyet from Uruguay and di Canio from Italy. Both won the Sunderland job after dragging smaller clubs up the ladder in England’s minor leagues. And both were chosen for the Sunderland job by Ellis Short, a Missouri-born hedge-fund billionaire whose Sunderland takeover in 2008 was part of an overseas incursion that has put more than half of the Premier League’s 20 clubs under foreign ownership. The di Canio era at Sunderland proved to be one of the most quixotic in the history of English soccer. Controversial from the start, he was hired despite angry protests by Sunderland’s fans about his links to neo-fascist groups in Italy. Though he denied ever having been a fascist, a photograph of him giving a straight-armed, flat-palmed salute to the fans of Lazio, the Rome-based club where he was a star striker, left many of his detractors unconvinced. The animosity subsided after Sunderland narrowly avoided relegation from the Premier League in May, but the rapturous mood quickly turned amid di Canio-imposed bans on everything from kitchen condiments to cellphones in club facilities and a winless start to this season. A players’ rebellion ensued, followed swiftly by a telephone call to di Canio from Short dismissing him. On Saturday, with a home game against Swansea, Sunderland will begin its latest bid to dodge relegation. With 31 games remaining, Sunderland will struggle to match the 39 points that only barely saved it last season. No club has achieved such an improbable comeback since the Premier League was established in 1992, and it takes a die-hard optimist to believe Sunderland can do it this year. Poyet is firmly in that camp. “We’re at the bottom, and that’s bad,” he said at a news conference Wednesday. But he said that Sunderland had enough quality players to fight its way out. “I am convinced,” he said. “Now, I need to convince the players, those that go on the pitch, to believe, to commit and fight for the football club.” Hope that all is not lost was buoyed by the team’s last outing, a home game two weeks ago against Manchester United. Sunderland led by 1-0 at halftime, only to be denied victory because of the superb goalkeeping by United’s David de Gea and two stunning strikes by the teenager Adnan Januzaj. That game was played under a stand-in coach, Kevin Ball, who was replaced days later by Poyet. Pressed for his own verdict on di Canio, Poyet suggested that he sympathized with the effort to wring more commitment from the players, but understood, too, the need to sustain morale. Too much “enjoyment,” he said, was not appropriate for a club struggling to survive, “but at the same time we cannot kill ourselves.” He added: “I don’t think being too serious makes you win games, nor the opposite, but I don’t think you can go to the extreme.” Extreme might be an apt description for di Canio’s changes for this season, the start of what he declared would be a “revolution” at Sunderland. Nearly half of the playing squad was dismissed, including some of the stars of the club’s survival last season, after di Canio described them publicly as “snobby and lazy.” The ones who remained were admonished for nonfootball banter in the dressing room and warned that any of them found with a mobile phone in their possession would have it thrown “into the North Sea.” Players were forbidden, too, from fraternizing with women at the club, not only younger ones who worked in the banquet suites or those who cleaned or worked in the canteen — where ketchup, mayonnaise and even Coca-Cola were now banned — but also an older, much-loved tea lady who had worked at the club for 40 years. Among Sunderland fans, opinion on di Canio remains divided. “You don’t want guys turning up late for training, drinking half the night before a game, cavorting in Newcastle casinos, do you?” said Barry Waller, 56, an unemployed mineworker, as he gripped a plastic tankard of beer at the Colliery Tavern, across the road from the stadium, before the Manchester United game. “Paolo was right to take the stick to them.” But another fan, dressed like many in a red-and-white-striped Sunderland jersey, disagreed. “You can’t have ketchup, you can’t have pizza, you can’t talk to the tea lady — it’s no wonder morale went down,” said James Waggitt, 46. “He was a bully, and I say good riddance to him.” Short declined to be interviewed, saying through an assistant at his London office that he “never gives interviews.” But as he installed his fourth full-time manager in four years he seemed to speak plainly enough in a message to the fans that appeared in the program for the United game. In clear terms, he suggested that his patience, after investing somewhere between $100 million to $200 million in the club, is finite. Dropping out of the Premier League would cost Sunderland its share of the league’s $1.6 billion in global television earnings — about $120 million this year — and much of the loss would likely default to the owner, whose personal fortune has been estimated at $2 billion. Perhaps not surprisingly, he described surviving in the Premier League in the program as “the absolute necessity,” adding that “the long-term aim becomes irrelevant if we aren’t at the top level.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/s...-approach-to-struggling-sunderland.html?_r=1&
Yeah, it's a loosely factual overview of the last 6 months. It is a report from the other side of the world I suppose.
The fact they state his reign starts with a home game v Swansea tells me it's poorly researched. However, it's undeniable that we are in a difficult position currently. I'd love to see the headlines in another 6 or 7 weeks. I think we will be out of the bottom 3 in 2 months time.
Aye, the home game error was a giveaway. I managed to stir some mags up at the warehouse the other day by suggesting that, with their run of fixtures, in 2 months time we could easily swap places. Didn`t go down too well.
Someone will have read Swansea v Sunderland and done what the yanks do - put the away team first, as in "Swansea AT Sunderland". Anyway, a good read i think - and as the saying goes, "no publicity is bad publicity" x
