Dan Neil has outlines the frustration of being left out during our immense run to promotion from League One, and how he tried to prove Alex Neil wrong during pre-season by putting in immense defensive work.
FRUSTRATED
“I talk to my dad about my career and how things are going. I always go back to last year when Alex Neil came in and I got taken out of the team. I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t very happy because I got taken out of the team and I felt like just as everything had gone from zero to 100 very, very fast, everything then went from 100 to zero even faster. I was thinking, ‘What’s going on?’"
STRAIGHT TALKING
“I did have chats with the old manager, Alex Neil, and he basically just told me straight. He said, ‘This is what you need to improve on if you want to play in my team’. Obviously, I want to play for Sunderland and he was the manager at that point, so I did want to play in his team. I had to make sure that I improved on those things."
PRE-SEASON
“I probably knew that I wasn’t really going to get back in at the end of last season because we were doing so well and on such a good run, so my mind almost changed to the off-season, thinking, ‘Right, what can I do to make sure that when it comes to the first game of next season, I’m on that team sheet’.”
DEFENSIVE ISSUES
“I was taken out of the team because my defensive stuff wasn’t good enough. It was nothing to do with what I was doing on the ball, going forward, or technical things or anything like that. It was second balls, winning duels, stuff like that."
HARD WORK
“I knew, going into the off season, that I had to improve on that. I focused more on that than any of the on-the-ball stuff. It made a difference. There was even a bit in the season where I was thinking, ‘My defensive side’s actually better than my attacking side now and I need to level it back out again’. I think I’m starting to do that now, and get the balance of it about right.”
STUDYING
“It’s been about doing a little bit of everything, really. It’s watching clips and thinking, ‘Right, where should I be in there – should I have pressed, should I have stayed in?’."
WEIGHT LOSS
"I’ve also lost a bit of weight, which has made me a bit faster over the ground and more dynamic. Last year, there were times where I felt a little bit heavy, and as though I was maybe a yard off getting to people. I would say that’s definitely something I’ve been working on this year, keeping the weight down to enable me to do that.”
