Wednesday 28 March 2018 12:05, UK
Sunderland are heading for another relegation but how can Chris Coleman change the culture of failure? Adam Bate takes a look at a club still stuck in a downward spiral.
"Sunderland are unique," former chairman Sir Bob Murray said back in 1999. At the time, that word unique had positive connotations when ascribed to Sunderland. The club were top of English football's second tier and had just drawn a crowd of 33,517 for a reserve game against Liverpool. "No one else in the country can touch us," Murray argued.
"We want to be a national club, a household name, perhaps everyone's second favourite team." He was not far wrong. Sunderland had the third highest average attendance in English football that season behind Manchester United and Liverpool, drawing bigger crowds than reigning champions Arsenal - and they weren't even in the Premier League.
Almost 20 years on and the kids who took advantage of the free tickets to go to the Stadium of Light for that reserve game against Liverpool should be the club's vocal driving force. Instead, they have seen only decline. Sunderland finally succumbed to relegation last season. Now they are bottom of the Championship. The downward spiral continues.
They go to Derby County on Friday evening on a run of 10 games without a win, only takeover talk providing a semblance of hope. Burton Albion, a mid-table side in the Southern Division two decades ago, are the one side that Sunderland are within four points of catching and Chris Coleman's men will need to overhaul two more if they are to prevent the seemingly inevitable.
The story of where it went wrong is a long and unhappy one. Many are unwilling to let David Moyes off the hook so easily for the season that saw Sunderland surrender their Premier League status without a fight. Others point to a deeper malaise that has prevented any real sense of progress for years and was summed up by Gus Poyet in his 'rotten core' speech.
"I think there is something wrong in the football club and it is not an excuse," said Poyet. "I need to find that. If I do not find it we have got a problem." Something was lost. Peter Reid's team had embodied the spirit of the region, but empathy and understanding disappeared. Sunderland became bloated but empty - a husk of what a club should be. Toxic even.
Jack Rodwell and Darron Gibson have come to symbolise the excess. The former sitting on a £70,000 per week contract but lacking the ability to justify it or the ambition to seek success elsewhere. The latter charged with drink-driving on the morning of the club's 2-0 home defeat to Preston. Sunderland were at least quick to suspend Gibson for his actions.
All of which does nothing to heal that ever-growing sense of disconnect between the club and its supporters. It is that most vicious of cycles, a club with an absent owner in Ellis Short seemingly locked in a nightmare of its own making. Are they losing games because they do not care enough? Or do they not care enough because they are losing games?
Sunderland captain Lee Cattermole opened up about the mental challenge last month, not only saying that it can be "ridiculously horrible" and to feeling "unbelievably low" but admitting that there are times where he asks himself whether he can go through it all again. The language used to describe Sunderland is akin to a virus. It certainly seems contagious.
Like many before him, Coleman's predecessor Simon Grayson had the diagnosis but not the cure. "It's probably summed up when you go into the dressing room and one of the younger lads says, 'we're soft as such and such' - and he's right," said Grayson when discussing the miserable 5-2 defeat to Ipswich in September. "We're too easy to play against."
Older heads who are broken by the experiences of recent seasons. Younger ones who are being dragged down by the environment in which they find themselves. So how exactly can it be fixed? That is the question Coleman must be pondering. Some are already wondering whether he can solve things but whoever is in charge, the lesson of history must be learned.
It only requires a glance at the team that sits top of the Championship table to see how things can begin to turn around. Wolves' current success owes much to a Chinese takeover but the only team so far this century to fall from the first tier to the third in consecutive seasons began their resurgence with a League One title win under Kenny Jackett in 2014.
There were echoes of Sunderland's situation within the club that Jackett inherited. Away to Brighton in the final game of their second successive relegation season, Jamie O'Hara was rowing with supporters, Roger Johnson had his shirt thrown back at him and fans held up a banner with the words "joke club" written upon it. A new start was essential.
Jackett acknowledged that he could have named "one hell of a team sheet" in League One but games are not won on paper. Wolves cleared out the lot, still paying the wages where necessary. "The team needed new energy, new freshness, new enthusiasm, some people coming in who were genuinely excited to play for Wolves," Jackett later told The Guardian.
Sunderland look set to become the second side to pull off the inauspicious achievement of back-to-back relegations in this era of parachute payments, but there are other models to aspire to as well. There are the examples of Swansea, Southampton and Bournemouth. All succeeded in establishing a culture that carried them through the divisions in quick time.
With momentum on their side, Sunderland have the supporters to do it and the club's category one academy could yet be a boon. If George Honeyman and Lynden Gooch could emerge as the leaders of a younger side, one coupled with hungry new arrivals who are eager to show what they can do in front of big crowds, a new side may yet emerge.
"Culture does not change because we desire to change it," leadership guru Frances Hesselbein once said. "Culture changes when the organisation is transformed." But Coleman has not been the catalyst for that transformation that some had hoped, his experiences with Wales yet to prove transferable to life at the helm of Championship strugglers.
In one sense, that Wales national team job was the mirror opposite of this one. The team was on the right track under Gary Speed, having won four of their last five games prior to his tragic death. Coleman's role was to continue that good work. In fact, he has since said that he stuck too rigidly to that model - failing to put his own stamp on things initially.
No need for such ambiguity here. Sunderland demands drastic changes. "The mistakes then were that I did not go in and do exactly what I wanted at the start," Coleman said recently of his tough first year with Wales. "It took a bit of time, but that is not going to happen here. If it doesn't happen for me in six or 12 months, then I'm not going to make that excuse again."
Four months and 22 games into Coleman's reign and only Barnsley have picked up fewer points in the Championship. Time will soon tell whether Coleman is bound to fail like so many before him or whether there could yet be echoes of that Wales job and a period of failure will prove the prelude to a new team emerging in the manager's image.
It will need a culture change. It will need positivity and ambition. New ideas and new energy. It will need Sunderland to remind the world that it was once seen as a unique club for the right reasons. Maybe then the supporters who once packed out the Stadium of Light to watch the reserves will finally be rewarded with a team that is worthy of their support.
Don't miss the Sky Bet Championship clash between Derby and Sunderland on Friday night, live on Sky Sports Football and Main Event from 7.30pm
