Michael Beale has been sacked and practically nobody will be disappointed by his departure other than maybe the man himself.
When we made the decision to part ways with Tony Mowbray, it was always going to be an important moment in the history of Kyril Louis-Drefus’s time as owner and Kristjaan Speakman’s time as sporting director because sacking a popular manager isn’t something that should be done without a sensible or concrete succession plan in place.
Unfortunately, they had neither really. To be completely fair if we had pulled off Will Still it would have represented everything right with how the club is being run. A young, exciting appointment of a man probably very eager to prove himself in the English game. However, we didn’t pull that off and we were left with our backup option, Michael Beale.
Beale did alright at Queens Park Rangers and looking at win percentage only is technically one of the best managers in Rangers history. Football goes beyond win percentages though and given what was said about Beale by fans of both of those clubs it is no surprise that his tendency to cause offence carried over into the North East.
His appointment was definitely a bad idea, towards the end of Mowbray’s tenure we were at best inconsistent and at worst slipping into mid table obscurity, unable to win away from home and dropping points to relegation threatened sides at home. The new man needed to hit the ground running then and fast to convince an unenthused and outright hostile fanbase of his standing as our head coach.
Therefore we needed a man able to inspire both the players and the fans and Beale is simply not that type of coach, in fact his words often did the opposite. Digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole with every press conference it seemed at times. Calling our fans ‘background noise’ and completely throwing Adil Aouchiche under the bus after the defeat away to Ipswich are but two examples I can immediately think of. Even if it was Aouchiche’s fault we lost calling him out in public for it is not how you should conduct yourself as head coach, that’s something that needs to be done privately away from the media.
Another reason it was a bad idea was that due to our model the club needs to allow room for patience (a young squad isn’t always going to make progress as quickly as we’d like) and having an unpopular coach in the dugout whilst we were inconsistent is basically the opposite of that. At least with Mowbray our fans were mostly positive even when we lost. Is that Michael Beale’s fault? No it isn’t and Speakman has his share of the blame but that doesn’t detract from some of the horrific performances we’ve seen under him.
Scraping a point away to Rotherham and being humiliated by Huddersfield away from home as well as an utterly awful showing at home to Hull and a battering in his first game in charge against Coventry represented the worst of his time here and those matches will be quickly forgotten about hopefully. His last game showed that he hadn’t learned much of anything from his mistakes by once again starting Mason Burstow, although he had scored semi-recently it’s hard to argue that he’s done more than Rusyn to warrant a place in the starting XI. At the very least they should have been playing together but even then Hemir probably deserves a chance over Burstow by now.
An inability to deal with set pieces is another gripe as is his reactive rather than proactive substitutions, how many times did he make a change only after we had gone behind? In fairness conceding from set pieces is a problem that predates Beale but he still did very little to try and change it.
That’s not to say it was all bad, we had a great 45 minutes against Plymouth and a good first half against Preston. There was a win away to top six rivals Hull City and a comfortable win at home to Stoke. Even when we had a spell of good though it was usually followed by an equal run of awful and there weren’t really any games where we looked certain to win throughout the whole 90 (even Stoke made us nervy at times).
For example, beat Preston at home with a striker finally scoring, why not follow that up with three defeats in a row that includes a defeat to your local rivals, throwing away a lead away to Ipswich and losing in a game that would put an insomniac into a deep sleep? Or better yet win 3-1 at home and look to be finally turning a corner and then lose two in one week to bottom half sides immediately afterwards.
He continued to insist with Bellingham and Ekwah in the middle, despite one clearly being exhausted and one being in quite bad form. The one time Bellingham was dropped he came off the bench and scored as well so giving him a few games as a sub wouldn’t have been the worst idea in the world. Aouchiche had cost us away to Ipswich but surely he deserved another chance at some point and Rigg whilst only being 16 is clearly a player who could cope with half an hour when Ekwah wasn’t performing. Even if it didn’t work then surely that would have reflected more poorly on the recruitment than him as head coach. There was even the option of moving Ba into the middle and having Mundle out on the right, the one time we had Ba in the middle we actually won, a more controversial suggestion though because the win can’t really be argued to have been because of this. The main point is he didn’t try to change things in this area of the pitch when it clearly was not working that well.
Reportedly his relationship with the players had broken down as well and given him ignoring Trai Hume that’s no real surprise. I can’t imagine players such as Seelt, Hemir or Rusyn would have been too happy with his squad management either. Young players need a manager to look up to not be frustrated with to develop properly and I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the main considerations of Speakman when he decided to pull the trigger but then again this eventuality was entirely obvious when you look at his record of managing players at QPR and Rangers.
In spite of all the criticisms at Speakman I’ve just talked about because of this appointment it’s important to remember that this is the first major thing he’s gotten wrong (at least on the managerial front) since coming into the club and we really still aren’t in that bad of a position. If we finished 10th come the end of the season there’s still a nice platform to build on especially with some of the fees we are likely to get for some of our players (Clarke most notably), that would make us an attractive place to come for any managers searching for employment in the summer and maybe this time we can land our first choice. Remember Alex Neil and Tony Mowbray weren’t our first choices either and they both did great things here so perhaps he should be forgiven in part at least for believing this would work out. Besides he’s clearly quickly reversed his decision so the damage is nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
This sacking also shows that a week is a long time in football, an even longer time here at Sunderland because only last Saturday when we’d been buzzing after a win against Plymouth public opinion had very much started to swing back in favour of Michael Beale, alas he was unable to ride the wave of optimism that resulted and fell straight into the water. He was very much unable to use the time a few good results had given him to stabilise his position. Dodds is a capable temporary boss so I’m confident we’ll be able to maintain where we are at the very least.
