We had a fairly ordinary team perhaps but in Darren Bent, we had a supreme goalscorer. A genuine 20 goal a season man. He'd already broken into the England set up as a Sunderland player and scoring goals the way he was, he wouldn't have been ignored by Crapello. With him in the team, we ALWAYS had a threat of scoring. Bruce was flying along and the SOL was rocking to the Bent goal machine. So, what if we had just paid Bent the money he wanted and as an England International he maybe deserved, where would we as a club, us fans, Quinn as Chairman, Short as owner and Bruce as a manager be? IMO, in a very different place to the one we are in today for sure. I reckon we would have finished the season comfortably top 7/8 and maybe in the UEFA Cup. The club could have used the Henderson money to recruit the left winger and left back we needed and still get Vaughan, Larsson, Gardener, Brown and O Shea in. Hell, we could have paid Gyan more too for that matter. The extra £30k per week he wanted equates to £4.5m over 3 years and if Gyan was given a £20k per week he would have been kept happy and that would cost £3m over 3 years. A total of £7.5m over 3 years. We would have been in a good place as a club and probably in the top 6 or 7 again this season and well placed to cement our place as EPL stalwarts. Instead, we have a loaned forward, a left back playing part time forward and a winger-cum-midfielder as his deputy. We are 2 points from relegation and the whole magic carpet ride is derailed. Bruce is clinging to his job by his fingernails and has lost the majority of fans, a position that I cant think of any manager recovering from in my lifetime. So for £7.5m quid (£2.5m per annum) we have screwed the whole thing up. If you consider that there is £750k per place in the EPL up for grabs, then if we finish 4 places lower than we did last year (almost a certainty now) we will have lost 2.5m anyway and be worse off financially AND will have lost a manager and 3 years of his foundation building and one of the top strikers in the EPL. I bet when Quinn, Short and Bruce sat down last January and decided to let him go they were rubbing their hands with glee at getting £20m for Bent. I bet they are not too chilly about it now though eh? We should have just paid him what he wanted and got through it. When season ticket renewals drop on our mats in another 3 months, a bottom 6 or 7 place wont entice many to re-invest imo and we will lose there as well. Altogether, it was our Gerald Ratner moment. We had a thriving business and a best selling product but we threw it aways in the blink of an eye. When we all reflect back on 2011 in years to come, it will be remembered as the year that got away from us and the last chance we had to establish the club as a big player in this league had disappeared in a whisper.
i had an artical on saterday which talked about bent basically capello told him to move to get into england so i think we whould have had to give him alot of money to stay
Cest - I agree with every single point you made here - except the crucial one. We're simply not a big enough club to pay it. With wages running at 80% of turnover, how much more are we supposed to pay? I'm not the hypocrite so many on here are - Bent was great when he was here, and the moment he left he was over-rated and not that good, etc. I was a Bent fan then and I'm a Bent fan now. I think he's a brilliant player whichever club he plays for. But the truth is England's top striker asked us for less than half of what was being paid to England's central defender - hardly "greedy" was it? - and SAFC just couldn't afford it. We have to catch up on the marketing trick - pure and simple. Get more money in, and we can pay more money out. Until we do, we're knackered and will remain knackered.
Cest, as usual from you that's a very interesting and insightful post. There was of course another option - do what you said we should have done when B€nt had left, bring in replacement(s). They wouldn't have been as good as B€nt of course, I'm talking about Riccardo Fuller-type players, but at least we would have had actual experienced strikers, playing in their proper positions, and wouldn't have had to play 4-6-0. Don't tell me we couldn't have got those type of players from the PL or the better European leagues. Yet we got no-one in. Amazing. We lost a 20+ goal striker, who we totally relied on, and replaced him with ... nobody. With some mediocre strikers we wouldn't have got into the UEFA Cup, but we wouldn't be heading for the bottom three either.
Cutey, I agree completely. I couldn't believe it when we signed Bent. Us, Sunderland, after years of John Steads & Wayne Entwistles, had gone out and splashed the cash for a proper established 20+ PL goalscorer. What a statement of intent. What ambition. And for the same reason I was gutted when he left, and it was obvious what was going to happen. We were massively over-reliant on him. Our midfield couldn't score. And we got no replacement whatsoever in January. Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing, and of course it was human nature to pretend he wasn't that good when he left, but like you I didn't join in with the wishful thinking. Whay we need to do is replace Bruce tomorrow morning, and give the new man (MON would do me too) some cash to bring in some strikers - they don't have to be world class, they don't have to be expensive, just experienced strikers - in January to keep us up. Then take it from there.
Bent is a top striker. He was prior to us buying him and remained so afterwards. His leaving didn't make him a bad player but it did focus our feelings about him. I said at the time and have reiterated since, there isn't a better pound for pound goalscorer in the EPL and If could walk into any of the top 4 clubs. He is a better striker than Torres and cost less than half. Better than Rooney and Adebayor as a striker and as good as RVP and anything at man city. To say we couldn't afford him is folly, especially when you consider what it has cost us now in money terms and As a club since he was allowed to leave.
Well if we did not keep Bent we had to replace him, that we failed to do, simple really. As a result what we failing to do atm is score goals so the Short/Quinn/Bruce strategy did not work. As SB was undoubtedly part of the management and he carried prime responsibility for the team as well as all his on the on field tactics and misplacing of players and subs...he has to go. Of course Ji and Wickham have been bought in for £10m as strikers, unfortunately we need them to score now, they are not. I imagine if Bruce choose to spend the cash available on these two and the likes of Gardner he can hardly blame Short/Quinn, that is £16m alone. It was a striker and a left winger we needed we could have made do with the CMs we had e.g. Zenden and not let them go. So the summer recruitment brought in some good players, but not for the positions that were top of the list...SB has to take a large share of the blame for that.
I don't think it was just about the money, like I said before, someone in the England camp advised what would happen if he didn't move
Totally agree - he would never get international recognition playing for Sunderland - Who has over the past 30 years?? Phillips - the only English player EVER to win the european golden shoe award failed to get into the England squad - although Shearer did pick the squad at the time. Bent was the only European striker with over 20 goals to his name not to go to the World Cup (I believe) - and to take Heskey was a ****in insult above all insults - although he is his strike partner now!!!
I can see where your coming from (Cest). BUT give an extra £20,000 just like that. Remember he just had a pay rise 6 months earlier and he would have asked for another one in another 6 months. In short, He's a greedy **** and I'm glad he ****ed off. Now we just need to replace Gyan. (Bent has already been replaced)
Sorry to burst your bubble kidda but Bent had actually already won back his place in an England shirt and scored whilst also wearing a Sunderland shirt. If he had kept up his goals tally for us, he would have still made the team and squad for England imo. To say an extra 20 grand a week was not worth paying, tell me how much has his leaving cost up both financially and as a club in general? Since he was sold, our bandwagon has totally derailed; we have fallen out with a manager that was totally fine up to that point and he now stands on the brink of being sacked (there's a 4m loss on its own which is less than the extra money Bent wanted); lost our talisman chairman; the fans are up in arms, arguing with each other at the match; and worst of all, we are once again just a relegation haunted club. 20 grand a week was a price we now couldn't afford NOT to have paid to be honest.
It's not that it wasn't affordable. It had to be on principle. He had just got a pay rise for threatening to walk out and go to Turkey and here he was earning £40,000 a week and wanted more. It's just not on. One example of why it didn't have to **** up our whole club is the Mags. Carol. The mags thought this guy was going to be their next superstar for years to come. The only thing that kept them (just) on side was the massive fee they got. They like us thought the buying club had paid too well for our strikers. But what have they done about it. They have moved on and gone from strength to strength. It seems we haven't and gone from strength to ****e.
For me our biggest folly was to buy Ji and Wickham. Don't get me wrong I think both could be immense players and worth a lot more in the future compared to our investment. However we have to be honest - as a club we can't take gambles (especially to the magnitude of Wickham) when we only had 1 established striker on our books (Gyan). For me we need to sign 2 more established stikers still, 1 in January and one in the Summer, then offload Gyan. With his sale and the money from Henderson in the bank still then we should be looking to spend £15m or so on each, because you do get what you pay for (Torres currently excluded!)
It was more than a folly considering they were not for this season. Steve Bruce's words, yet last week end he was moaning that we needed a Wickham. First impressions are that Ji not up to much tbh (maybe the culture/weather is against him). Whickham on the other hand has what it takes but cannot be classed as a saviour. As with Noble.
