For David Moyes, no shadow looms larger than that cast by Sam Allardyce.
With every defeat Sunderland suffer, the idea that their manager could be succeeded by his predecessor grows even if the club’s hierarchy remains impervious to it. It isn’t a suggestion that is going to go away easily either. Sunderland are too bad for that to happen. Allardyce may be out of sight, but he is most definitely not out of mind.
The growing fear is that Moyes will be the manager who takes Sunderland down. That outcome could be averted, of course, if he loses his job before they are relegated but should he remain the likelihood is that he will preside over a relegated team. With only two points from their opening ten games, it would take something remarkable for Sunderland to avoid the drop.
That this is the case on the opening day of November will give the most optimistic Sunderland supporters hope that time is still on their side. Time, though, is all that they have and time is no good to anyone unless the possibility exists of making best use of it. Sunderland find themselves cast as this season’s Aston Villa and all that remains is for them to fulfil their fixtures in the hope that their seemingly inevitable fate is sealed without undue ignominy.
“Aston Villa last season had better quality than this side,” Jamie Carragher claimed on Monday Night Football. “I just think there was a bad attitude going straight through that club. I don’t see a bad attitude at Sunderland I just see a group of really poor players who I think would struggle in the Championship.” And that, more than anything, is the point. For all the scrutiny that their manager will continue to come under, it is the bulk of those who are letting him and Sunderland down on the pitch who need to go, not Moyes.
The main problem that Moyes now has, other than having taken over the Premier League’s weakest squad, is that his ill-fated and brief spell at Manchester United has left him with an image problem. When he admitted on the eve of the new season that Sunderland supporters should expect a relegation battle, he was widely criticised as a defeatist by many with others accusing him of lowering expectations to suit his own ends.
“I don’t think you can hide the facts,” he argued. “People will be flat because they are hoping that something is going to dramatically change – it can’t dramatically change, it can’t.” This wasn’t inspirational by any means but surely it is better to be realistic about a club which had finished 17th, 14th, 16th and 17th in the last four seasons than it was to suggest that Sunderland could “do a Leicester” by going from relegation candidates to champions in the space of 12 months?
That may be taking the argument to an extreme but blame Jermaine Defoe for that. He was the one who claimed it was possible. “You do think, if they [Leicester] can do that why can’t we?” he said last February. “We have such a strong squad here now.” Tellingly, Moyes was lampooned for his realism in a way that Defoe wasn’t for his absurd optimism. Maybe he would have been better off peddling false hope. Maybe the fact that a club which had averaged 38.5 points over the last four seasons should have been conveniently ignored. Moyes chose to tell it like it is and he paid the price.
If he was to take this strategy to its logical conclusion he would come out and say that the best thing that could happen to Sunderland would be for them to finally be put out of their misery. Their current state is akin to football purgatory with each new manager tasked with firefighting, the only difference being that some are asked to do it from the start of the season when the blaze is already inevitable and others are brought in to do it at a later stage when the flames are threatening to get out of control.
In those conditions, there is no prospect of building a team that can be competitive in the long term because all that matters is the here and now. There is also no possibility of building the kind of momentum that Rafael Benitez is overseeing at Newcastle United because the standard of opposition is too high to allow that. It is a grim, self-perpetuating existence that needs to be broken and in the absence of the kind of investment and boardroom leadership that could transform their fortunes, the only way that can happen is if Sunderland drop down to the Championship and rebuild from there.
Such a notion will rightly be unpalatable to Sunderland’s fans who will understandably view survival as the bare minimum of their ambitions but beyond their own loyalty there is precious little about the club that they support that is of Premier League standard. Financially, they are struggling. Their most recent loss was £25 million and during the same fiscal year only two Premier League clubs, Villa and Queens Park Rangers, fared worse. As the Northern Echo pointed out, “We all know what happened to them.”
The last time Sunderland posted a profit was 2006. Their total debt stands at £141 million. Only once since Short took over the club in 2009 have they finished in the top half of the Premier League and even then, in 2011, they came tenth. Short has spent money, but rarely has it been invested well.
“The amount that I fund every season, exceeds the collective total amount funded by every owner the club has ever had since the club was formed in 1879,” he once said. “I have done this willingly because I want us to be more than a club that simply exists in the top flight.” His speculation, though, has too often revolved around quick fixes and the accumulation he had hoped for has not transpired.
This is the point where removing Moyes and replacing him with another manager, Allardyce or whoever, stops making sense. If Sunderland’s recent history tells us anything it is that the best they can hope for from chopping and changing is that they will run to stand still, at worst it will stave off the inevitable until the inevitable consumes them. Furthermore, if Moyes’s managerial record tells us anything it is that he is a slow builder, someone who takes his time to identify problems before coming up with solutions. He doesn’t do quick fixes but Sunderland should see that as a good thing because quick fixes are the last thing that they need.
Right now, the chances are that, rather than looking at what others at the club could be doing for him that they are not, Moyes will be asking searching questions of himself. “The first thing he will do is have a look at what he is doing,” Alan Irvine, Moyes’s assistant manager during his first six years at Everton, explained when asked how he will be dealing with a crisis. “He has always been one who investigates what he has done and whether it could have been done better or differently. He is not someone who will look for a whole load of excuses and attempt to blame other people.
“He will, if it’s possible, work even harder and he is already someone with a fantastic work ethic. He will do whatever he has to do to find a solution to a particular problem. Quite often he’ll go back to basics and the things he knows have worked in the past and will work again. It is very much a case of him looking inwards first of all and seeing what he can do to make the situation better. He won’t be frightened by it at all. The biggest thing about him is that he doesn’t look to blame other people and the first person he looks at is himself, sometimes wrongly in my opinion.”
The lessons from Moyes’s time at Everton are the ones that Short should take most heed of if and when he comes under mounting pressure to dismiss his manager. In his second full season at the club, Everton finished just one place above the relegation zone and had a planned takeover taken place he might have been sacked. But while the work he was doing on the training ground, the attitude he was instilling and the improvements he was overseeing were unseen at that stage they did not remain so and the following season Everton finished fourth despite having spent only £2 million on Tim Cahill and Marcus Bent.
It was how Moyes responded to adversity, to the threat to his own job and to Everton’s Premier League status that is most engrained on the memories of those who worked with him during that period. “David’s response was to work double-time,” Kevin Kilbane recalled. “He will work through a problem, that’s what he likes to do, and that works for him. I think he has got his rewards for how he has dealt with those testing times. They are the moments when he has shown his true worth.”
Upon arriving at Everton, Moyes had one opening ambition. “The initial part was just to avoid relegation and hoping that I am not the guy who takes Everton out of the league,” he later admitted. Given their own recent struggles, it is unlikely that his aims were any different when handed the Sunderland job but barring an unexpected revival it is hard to see how he will avoid being that guy this time around. But while he may be powerless to prevent their decline, his achievements at Everton should be sufficient to convince Sunderland that he is the right manager to reverse it regardless of Allardyce’s ever lengthening shadow.
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