Sunderland - Train like you’ve never won, play like you’ve never lost

It’s becoming extremely difficult to write anything at all about Sunderland football club at the moment. Where do we start?! Propping up the table? 6 points from 12 games? A complete inability to close out a game? A lack of quality in the squad? A culture of desperation throughout the club?

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Article by Ben Mummery

This will mark the sixth or seventh time I’ve started to write a blog about our team, and just stopped after the initial paragraph, as there simply isn’t enough time to say what needs to be said, neither is there any scope to write anything intelligent that hasn’t been said over and over by journo and pundit alike!

However I’m determined to struggle through this time, and finish one piece, whether it be readable or not you can decide for yourself!

Let’s face it, the problems at Sunderland go way beyond simply losing games of football! Our woes are far more serious than 11 lads who can’t buy a win, with the obvious exception of our annual points from our friends up the road!

For a long time now, we seem to have been drenched in a cloud of desperation at Sunderland, the whole club has had an insecure feeling about it, you can almost smell it in the air on match days! Not one Sunderland fan could look you in the eye and tell you the last time they turned up for a game knowing they stood a great chance of going home happy, and knowing that the club was in a good place. Let me cast your mind back to the end of the 2013-2014 season, our “miracle” run under Gus, which saw us beat Chelsea, Man Utd, wallop Cardiff at home and even take points from Man City to achieve the unlikeliest of escape attempts. But before that, when was the last prolonged period of security that you can remember at Sunderland? Steve Bruce’s first two campaigns? Darren Bent scoring twenty five goals a season? It’s a difficult one isn’t it.

There’s permanently an air of tension around our club, around our players, management, our financial situation, transfer policy and especially where it counts most - in the stands.

What can we do about this? How can the powers that be make this awful uneasy feeling go away once and for all?

With the situation at Newcastle being one of similar dissatisfaction, it’s becoming the norm for Journalists to talk about the “north east football landscape” being in a poor state, and the suggestion that top flight football in the north of England being under threat due to some sort of inadequacy with our region rather than our two clubs is now the go-to topic for discussion on local radio and in the press.

However, I’d have to be the first to disagree, and in the strongest possible terms.

The north east is a vibrant place, full of some of the most outgoing and interesting people you’re likely to meet anywhere in the world. Newcastle city center is one of the most cultural and fascinating of all the UK’s cities, and while it might not be the largest, still manages to offer all of the amenities on offer anywhere else in the country. Northumberland and County Durham offer some of the county’s finest residential areas, boasting scenery and landscapes able to attract the world’s great and good! So why then, can Sunderland football club manage to find itself so utterly behind it’s peers in terms of footballing success?!

It’s no secret to anybody with an internet connection that we’ve had a bit of a “lad” culture at SAFC in recent years. It’s been well documented that players have come to our club for little more than a doss, to earn big money and live “the life” of a premier league player. Girls, cars, big houses, these are nothing out of the ordinary to today’s multi-millionaire in his mid-twenties, blessed with the ability to take a touch and find a pass better than the rest of his primary school class-mates. Tales of excess drinking, gambling and general debauchery are the norm on Wearside. However we don’t hear these stories coming from Southampton, or Swansea, Everton, Crystal Palace or West Ham? Clubs you’d easily be able to argue have no more claim to success than we, and in some cases, clubs with smaller followings, grounds, and fan bases. As for our managerial merry-go-round, don’t get me started…!

We can dissect and discuss these issues until we’re blue in the face, however there’s no denying whatsoever that the unsettled nature of our club’s hierarchy is clearly transferring over to the playing side of things, I can seldom remember seeing a team of footballers who look so unsure of themselves, so unsettled, so under-prepared to do what is needed to win a game!

Winning is a peculiar thing. The best way to win games is to win games, wins generally follow other wins, as do losses. Winning and losing is a habit, whether premier league or Sunday league, teams who win regularly tend to stay that way, as do teams that get beaten every week.

OK, so the current crop of Sunderland players is no vintage squad, but after such a poor start to the campaign, finding themselves in the position they’re in, they’ve given themselves twice as hard a task to claw back some stability! You can see in our play, week after week. We’re nervous, we look uncomfortable when we’re facing a team who’re wanting to attack us, this weekend’s loss to Southampton was no exception! The Saints came to the stadium of light to pray on exactly that, our insecurity.

You could well argue that Big Sam is the right man to help and steady the ship at our club, and you’d not be far from the truth. A manager with not only a boat load of experience, but experience in English football. A hard man, a man who puts up with no rubbish from him team, insisting on every detail being properly addressed.

However, time will not be friendly to Sam or his team, and anything they can get from our remaining fixtures before January will be a bonus, this mid-term transfer window probably being the most important in the club’s recent history!

There’s an old saying – “Train like you’ve never won, play like you’ve never lost!”

At least we’ve got half of that correct…………..!

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