Roker ReportIf a deal for Will Still is kaput, what comes next for Sunderland?Now that Still looks set for Lens, it seems that our number one target has slipped from our grasp, so what happens now and can the process still be trusted?
Aside from football and Sunderland AFC, one of my enduring (and sometimes healthier) passions is Formula One.
During recent seasons, one of the most regular occurrences when watching Grands Prix has been a litany of frantic mid-race radio messages from the Ferrari pit wall to their drivers.
During races, you’d regularly hear calls of ‘Plan A’, ‘Plan B’ and ‘Plan C’, being relayed from the strategists to their drivers as other teams regularly outfoxed them.
These exchanges often contained an element of tragicomedy, and although Sunderland and Maranello, home of Ferrari, are worlds apart, it feels like contingency planning (or a genuine lack thereof) was something we shared, even if Ferrari are in better shape nowadays.
On Friday, the news broke that Will Still, pursued with vigour by Sunderland for a long time, had apparently rejected the chance to take over at the Stadium of Light and is now set to fill the vacancy at Lens.
Understandable, in one sense, if it’s true.
Taking over at a club with the prospect of Champions League football versus the challenge of attempting to rejuvenate a side who finished sixteenth in the English second tier is, you would think, a fairly easy choice.
Presumably, Still found the conditions on offer there more appealing than those put before him by Sunderland, and you can’t blame him for that, even if there was a lot of misplaced hype around a man who’s actually achieved little of note within the game.
However, what this situation does seem to shine a light on, and not for the first time, is the process that we’ve seemingly followed and whether the flaws in our much-vaunted ‘succession planning’ theory for hiring new head coaches have been addressed and fixed.
Simply put, I don’t believe we’ve learned any lessons from the botched process that led to Michael Beale being hired as Tony Mowbray’s replacement, and that we’re in real danger of making a mess of this situation as well.
Despite Kristjaan Speakman’s bombastic declaration that Beale was the right man for Sunderland, he clearly wasn’t, and it feels as though whoever takes the job this summer will find themselves reduced to the status of second, third or fourth choice, thereby putting them on the back foot from the start and possibly struggling to win over the fans.
The argument of ‘it’s been X amount of days since we had a head coach’ may be a predictable daily topic, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
After all, Mike Dodds was only ever operating under an ‘interim’ title, and the search for a permanent head coach, with credible alternatives lined up in parallel with our pursuit of Still, needed to begin before the ink was dry on Beale’s P45.
As the weeks have passed by and other Championship teams have moved to fill their vacancies or reward incumbents with new deals (Step forward, Dejphon Chansiri) our search for a head coach has yielded no breakthroughs.
Of course, I hear the arguments in favour of showing patience and not panicking, but it’s increasingly hard to escape the notion that we’ve dumped all of our eggs into one basket and that we possess no backup plans in case we found ourselves in a situation such as this.
Naturally, everyone’s having their say on what’s going on, and there are clear dividing lines between those who are willing to keep the faith and those who aren’t.
However, why shouldn’t the fans show concern? Why shouldn’t they speak out if they believe the club hierarchy aren’t being as efficient as they ought to be? If we offer praise for the good work that’s been done by this regime over the years, it’s only fair that criticism should be leveled at them when they get it wrong.
It doesn’t make you any less of a supporter if you do that, and expressing doubts about what’s actually going on doesn’t equate to a ‘meltdown’, either.
Of course, those who tag Speakman and the club in profanity-laden Twitter posts and the like are arguably wasting their energy, but there have been plenty of valid points raised recently, points that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand as the rantings of impatient supporters.
The arguments for ‘trusting the process’ have lost much of their impact, and you really have to question whether those in the boardroom are truly in tune with the fans, or whether they’re hunkering down, ignoring all ‘outside noise’ (remember that?) and ploughing on with no thoughts of compromise or a willingness to show flexibility.
Now that the Still pursuit seems to have reached a conclusion, the question must be asked: who’s in the frame now?
On Saturday, René Marić’s name was being mentioned once again, as was that of St Mirren boss Stephen Robinson (the latter presumably to be taken with a shovelful of salt), but the names themselves aren’t really the issue here, even if the last boss we lured down from Paisley wasn’t universally popular at the Stadium of Light.
Instead, it seems to be becoming increasingly obvious that we’re scrambling around for alternatives; searching high and low for a head coach willing to accept what’s on offer and hoping that someone will overlook the restrictions of the role in favour of trying to unlock the potential of our club.
If this is ‘succession planning’ at work, it doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence and it throws yet more uncertainty around our prospects for next season.
What else can we do except hope that this saga ends soon? It’s frustrating and worrying, but that’s Sunderland AFC of 2024.
