Firstly, a Happy New Year to everyone, I hope you managed to enjoy the festive season under unusual circumstances where a lateral flow became part of the yuletide festivities. With the cheese and wine business meetings over for the festive period it’s time to get down to the serious end of the season. We are officially more than half way through now and it has been a fairly interesting first half if we’re honest. It seems like only weeks ago when we were looking at the table thinking we were way off the pace in terms of automatic promotion and were, perhaps, a little despondent at our chances of getting up to the Championship. In those weeks things have managed to turn around and after a brief flirtation with the top spot we now sit second in the league in those all important automatic places. We are four points ahead of Wigan in third albeit they have three games in hand, but more on that later. More than that, we have just come off the back of a healthy win over Sheffield Wednesday who, until recently were in amongst the thick of the battle for the play off places and so things seem to have turned a bit of a corner. We always made reference to the lack of cover in certain areas and looked forward to getting through to January to see what we could do to rectify any shortages, and here we are in January, second in the league, one point off the top and the first January signing wrapped up. All seems well placed for the second half of the season and, for once perhaps, I am optimistic.
We limped through to January in terms of personnel and started many of the games in our run up to the window without any recognised full backs on the pitch and yet have still managed some good results which have enabled us to climb the table. This has partly been helped by the fact that Wigan haven’t played for a few weeks as a result, largely, of the Covid surge affecting football at the moment. So whilst our position is second, the pessimist might add nine points to Wigan’s total and see that we’re lying in third place and five points adrift. I’ve given up pessimism as a New Year’s resolution (like all resolutions this will probably wane within a few weeks) and so I am looking at those games in hand and thinking back to us being in similar positions as Wigan over the past few seasons and failing to capitalise on that. The reason is fairly simple, let’s assume Wigan were to win their games in hand, they will have to fit those games around their other existing fixtures. They are also still in the Papa John’s trophy and have a tough game against Blackburn this weekend, if indeed that goes ahead. If Sunderland keep winning games Wigan will be feeling the pressure of a fixture pile up as we did and to keep that momentum going in tired legs is challenging. Couple this with the breaking news reports that Rotherham’s Ladapo has handed in a transfer request there are factors which are certainly in our favour. We have played our games and we have nothing ahead of us bar league fixtures.
On that Ladapo transfer request, that is the worst case scenario for Sunderland right now. Someone having their head turned. There seems to be a cohesive group in the squad now, probably more so than I have seen since the Peter Reid days. If you think about Jack Ross’ season here and the Maja saga, that is precisely the type of thing we want to avoid and it appears, early in the window, Rotherham have failed to avoid it. Dan Neil has pledged his allegiance early and it seems unlikely that anybody else in the squad of any significance is going to go trotting off to pastures new so there will, hopefully, be little disruption to the current mood in the camp. Any disruption is more likely to come from any new arrivals but if we look at the players who have come in since Kristjaan Speakman arrived, the attitude seems to be younger, hungrier and more focussed. If that continues then any new arrivals can only provide competition and lift performance levels. We have seen many new arrivals disrupt the camp in recent years; hobbledehoys more concerned about their dress sense than how they best serve the club. Those days do seem to be behind us. Our first signing was Trai Hume for £200,000. That may not seem a huge amount but for a league one club to spend that amount on a teenager from Linfield. His contract is four and a half years long, a far cry from the expectation of the league of two year contracts as Stewart Donald once claimed to be the norm. There will be challenges this window because of the Covid surge as loan signings may be more difficult to come across. Squads will want to keep their ranks bolstered just in case and so, players like Callum Doyle may not be available. This is both good and bad news; bad for us in the sense that some of our targets may no longer be available; but the same goes for all the other clubs and that is good news for us. The playing field is levelled somewhat and as we go into the next round of fixtures at the right end of the form table it puts us in a better position. Going back to Wigan and them catching up on their games, they’re going to need a decent squad to fit in two games a week and I’m not convinced they have one.
In short I think we are masters of our own destiny now, if we can keep our heads while those around us lose theirs then I firmly believe we will finally succeed in getting out of this division. Whether that is me naively showing optimism for a positive streak with a losing streak round the corner remains to be seen but for now, I’m keeping to my resolution! As always FTM.
