Born on this day in 1944 is former Sunderland manager and promotion winner, Ken Knighton.
Ken had played for six English clubs in his playing career, Wolves, Oldham, Preston, Blackburn, Hull and Sheffield Wednesday, making over 350 appearances before arriving at Roker Park as a coach in 1976. In less than three years, he was made manager replacing ex Sunderland player Billy Elliot as boss. After being the man who ran on to the pitch with a sponge and water, Ken was soon donning the manager’s overcoat on the touchline instead.
His first season brought promotion with his first signing ,Pop Robson, weighing in with 22 crucial goals but his managerial career ended somewhat prematurely when he had clashes with chairman Tom Cowie the subsequent top flight season. Four games before the end of the that season Knighton was relieved of his duties. Knighton was a young and promising manager who delivered promotion at the first time of asking, something beyond even Bob Stokoe. Under Knighton we played good football and it’s a shame his managerial career was brief, only having one other club in Leyton Orient to test his managerial mettle.
We started the promotion season well with two wins and a draw and we beat Charlton 4-0 in October, John Hawley bagging a hat trick on his league debut. We had a small taste of League Cup glory before West Ham ended our run prematurely in the fourth round. Before that, we had beaten the Mags on penalties 7-6 after a 4-4 draw on aggregate and also saw off Manchester City.
Knighton turned our pretty poor away form round by December and ensured we were promotion contenders by January. By this time, Knighton had drafted in the expensive Claudio Marangoni which suggested he was maybe a manager ahead of his time. He signed for £320,000 but he simply couldn’t adapt to the English game despite bags of talent. He would later be named Argentinian Footballer of the Year but remained on a different wavelength to our players. Gary Rowell said that he played passes no one could see in training, expecting people to be there and simply could not adapt to more rigid football than in South America. He was still winning cups in Argentina nearly into his forties, so perhaps Knighton spotted a talented player who was just never going to fit in to the way he played –a Football Manager signing before Football Manager was invented.
Knighton brought in Joe Hinnigan in February 1980 to provide more options at full-back but when our form dipped towards the end of the campaign and nervousness around our prospects of promotion were high, we needed a big win to get back on track. Pop Robson and Shaun Elliot both scored braces and we hammered Watford at home. Promotion rested on one game, a draw would be enough to earn promotion. We ended our centenary season in the last promotion place with victory against West Ham. As ever, being a Sunderland fan is bad for your heart rate. In the summer of 1980, Knighton brought in Sam Allardyce to bolster our defensive options with Jeff Clarke’s knee having given out again, appointing him captain.
Despite Hawley grabbing his second Sunderland hat-trick in our first away game the following season at Man City as we won 4-0, by 11th April we had lost 19 out of 38 games. Both Ken and assistant Frank Clark were sacked after disputes with Tom Cowie, who wanted to stamp his authority. Mick Doherty took over as caretaker manager until the end of the season. Under Doherty, we beat the best team in the country and possibly the best team in the world, Liverpool, on the final day of the season to ensure we stayed up.
These two seasons are textbook Sunderland, going about things the hard way, parting with managers and taking it right down to the wire. Ken Knighton oversaw a really interesting part of Sunderland history, gaining promotion in our 100th year as a club and was in charge for some brilliant games. His style of play saw three players score hat-tricks at Roker in that first season - Hawley, Alan Brown (v Oldham), and Stan Cummins (four v Burnley).
