Former SAFC gaffer, Chris Coleman, is back in the news moaning about his time at Sunderland and his lack of relationship with Ellis Short. "Sunderland was 100 percent the right club. The chairman of Sunderland was 100 percent the wrong chairman. As a manager or a coach or even as a player, before you signed a contract you'd meet the chairman. I've still never had a conversation with him - not a text or an email. When we arrived we needed some help, and we got completely bombed. From Day One when we arrived - absolutely no dialogue, nothing. That really disappointed me. It's the right club and I would do it again, but only if it was a different chairman."
He was also disappointed at being sacked after getting Sunderland relegated: "He [Donald] sacked me before he'd even sat down to ask me what I thought. I was told through a third party that it was the end. We were out. It was going to take us two, three or four windows maybe, to turn it around. We needed to get a lot of players out, a lot of players in - but you can only do that if you have the backing of the chairman. I never met the chairman. We got in in November, by the middle of January we had lost five of the starting eleven players. We were in desperate need anyway to add to what we got, but we got no money. Not even for loans. He completely left us out in the cold and I was sad about that."
In other news, we are set to offload another top youth player, with Manchester United taking Joe Hugill off our hands for £250,000.
Meanwhile, Tom Flanagan reckons that the players still have a soft spot for Jack Ross. “I don’t need to tell you that Jack Ross knew that it was a results thing,” he said. “It didn’t quite work for him at that time. But I think that the players who are playing at the moment still owe him something. And I feel that the manager now would definitely say that as well because a lot of the players were players that he’s recruited. It’s down to this manager now. He’s getting the best out of the players. And I think that says a lot about his management technique. He likes to talk to the boys. He’s involved with the boys. He’s good on the training pitches, very positive around the place and there’s a good energy. We’re all just feeding off that same energy. We’ve still got plenty of points to play for and we’re not out of it by any stretch of the imagination. I’m sure the how the table is at the moment isn’t how it will finish, and there’s lots of more twists and turns to come. We’ve got to look forward to it.”
