MISSING PIECE?

Sir Alex Ferguson was once asked what his greatest strength was as a football manager. He said he knew what he wasn’t very good at and got people to help him who were better at it. This should be the goal of every director of football and football manager at every level of the game. It is, I suspect, where Sunderland are currently going wrong.

First let me say I think Regis is the right man for the job. It would be ridiculous to say anything else after the last two-and-a-bit seasons.

I also don’t want to focus on the wider non-first-team parts of the club. I will admit that I felt rather more relaxed about those aspects under Kristjaan Speakman than I do under Florent Ghisolfi but that’s not the point of this article. Speakman had experience of running an academy, a proven track record in developing young players, managing a large team of coaches at various levels and a network of connections around the world to be admired. Ghisolfi has no such CV. All I’ve seen from him so far is signing players he already knew or dealing with clubs he worked with but, maybe behind the scenes he stops strolling around in shiny shoes and designer coats and gets down to the hard work of running the football side of the club.

Putting to one side whether the structure of the club supports Regis from above, the more pressing issue is the backroom staff around him. Who does what? Who makes sure standards are maintained? Who is the motivator? Who drills the players? Who makes sure the defenders know their shape in any situation? Who is working with the strikers and attackers to speed up our counterattacking? And, perhaps most importantly, who tells Regis he’s wrong when it needs to be said?

Our set pieces coach, James Brayne has this week been replaced by Thor Herdal with Brayne leaving the club. In his eighteen months at the club, I can’t think of any positive attacking set pieces and a consistent frailty in defending them so, let’s hope this is a clue that the club are looking to answer these questions already.

We then have, directly under Regis, three first team coaches – Alessandro Barcherini, Jose Fonte and Michael Proctor. I think it’s worth me listing all of the previous full team coaching roles of these three before they joined Sunderland: East Durham College, Nottingham Trent University. That’s it.

Fonte has played fifty games for Portugal and has a long (if relatively uneventful) career as a centre half, Barcherini has a lot of experience as an academy goalkeeping coach working at Stoke, Leeds and Notts County and, of course, Proctor is one of our own, playing 48 games for the club, including a season in the Premier League. But I’m struggling to see where this gives these three the skills, experience or respect of the players to be coaches in the most challenging league in European football.

Fonte and Proctor rarely seem to offer thoughts and when they do, it seems that Le Bris more often than not says no.

Barcherini’s LinkedIn page (he doesn’t have a Wikipedia page) lists him as Assistant Head Coach. Really? On match days this seems to mean he sits looking like he’s trying to make an iPad and a laptop talk to each other and shaking his head with greater levels of IT induced frustration.

Maybe it’s time to Control-Alt-Delete on the back room staff.

When we arrived in the Premier League we brought in Luciano Vulcano as assistant manager. It was seven months where we performed better than any other time I’ve watched the club. Structurally, defensively, we looked like we could compete at the highest level. After he went, our form dipped massively. This might be a coincidence of course. But his presence seemed to bring everything together.

Before him Pedro Ribeiro held the role and, again, acted as the link between the manager and the supporting coaches. And again, a time of incredible success at the club.

Since they left it feels like there’s a cog missing in our backroom. Whether it’s to take on a role Regis isn’t great at, act as the person he can bounce ideas off, ensure standards are maintained or just act as the coaching guide to our inexperienced trio of supporting coaches we seem to be lacking a key part of the picture.

Through Alex Ferguson’s peak as a manager he had top quality assistants like Brian Kidd, Steve McLaren and Carlos Queiroz who fulfilled all of the roles I’ve listed above winning trophies at United and beyond. Managers need an assistant they trust. I fear until we find that person our team will look like a piece of the machine is missing.