Tony Mowbray has claimed that while managing Blackburn, Dan Neil was a transfer target. Had Sunderland missed out on promotion last year, Neil may well be a Blackburn player this season...
ON THE RADAR
"Dan’s career is on an upward trajectory, he’s a very talented boy. I sit here now, and as Blackburn Rovers manager last year, he was very much on our radar. If Sunderland weren’t going to get promoted, we would have been trying take him out of League One."
TRAINING
“Here I am now working with him every day, and I see the player I watched and thought he was. His passing range is very good and he can run all day. He’s one of the players we’re trying to get to break the box a bit more because I think he’s got a goal in him. He wants to learn and get better, and he wants to watch his clips after training. He wants to keep improving and, as a coach, there’s nothing better than a footballer that wants to improve and makes demands of your time to go and sit with him and talk through what you thought was good and bad.”
HOME GROWN
“The footballer has to be good enough, it’s all very well having a homegrown player in the team, but the homegrown guy can often be the one that takes a lot of the flak if things aren’t going well. They almost become an easy target. Dan seems to me as if he’s got the personality to be able to override that."
INFLUENCE ON GAMES
"He’s still a young boy, and he does have spells in games where he doesn’t influence it as much as he could. Because of the talent level he’s got, he should be impacting football matches a lot more, for longer. But I think he’ll grow into that and understand it."
ARTIST/SOLDIER
“You have to give them the confidence. If you talk about artists and soldiers, the soldiers should be winning the ball back and fighting and scrapping, and then the artists are the ones who pick the right pass and know when to dribble and shoot. Dan genuinely falls into both categories. You expect him to win second balls and put his foot in and win challenges, but then he can hit 60-yard diagonals where you think, ‘Wow, what a pass that is’. We want him to develop with us and hopefully we develop as a club as fast as he does.”
