Robbie Stockdale hoping Sam Allardyce’s lessons can save Sunderland

Ellis Short became a billionaire in the world of high finance but, transposed to planet football, Sunderland’s owner has had an awful lot of trouble making his numbers stack up. In a rare, and defiantly passionate, Friday afternoon address to fans, the American declared seventh place in the Premier League to be the club’s natural habitat. In reality, they kick off at Middlesbrough on Sunday lunchtime residing in the Championship’s relegation zone.
A key reason why his equations for success stubbornly refuse to balance rests with the relentless manager churn. Of the eight coaches Short – no longer actively trying to sell Sunderland – has worked with in the past six years, only one has departed on a high.
Admittedly, Sam Allardyce’s euphoria at taking charge of England soon evaporated, but he seemed the only recent recruit capable of breaking the club’s cycle of interminable struggle and of ensuring that Short might no longer need to keep injecting hundreds of thousands of pounds into a concern that, despite having recently spent a decade in the Premier League, showed an £110m debt on its most recent accounts.
“Sam’s larger than life, he got the team playing a certain way and there was certainly a buy-in from the players,” says Robbie Stockdale, Sunderland’s first-team coach who, in the wake of Simon Grayson’s sacking minutes after Tuesday’s 3-3 home draw with Bolton, has become the joint caretaker manager alongside Billy McKinlay. “Sam was a good fit.”
Allardyce will not be returning, but Stockdale feels that aspects of his character could serve as a useful template to help Short – so forensically sure-footed in the private equity sphere – to identify Grayson’s successor. “To manage the three big north-east clubs, you have to have a certain mentality,” says the Redcar-born former Boro defender. “The north-east is a really special place for football and you have to be able to stand up to that. It’s such a big deal for the supporters.”
Perhaps daunted by the attendant pressures – exacerbated by endless relegation battles – Sunderland’s ever-changing cast of managers have frequently appeared thoroughly depressed, dismayed and disillusioned, but Stockdale seems genuinely excited by his admittedly temporary challenge.
As he takes the seat variously filled by Steve Bruce, Martin O’Neill, Paolo Di Canio, Gus Poyet, Dick Advocaat, Allardyce, David Moyes and Grayson, the 37-year-old’s eyes are shining. “If I could choose one game in which to take charge of the team this would be it, it’s brilliant, it’s special,” he says. “I don’t think you could choose a better game for us. It could act as a catalyst.”
Given Stockdale’s heritage, the Tees-Wear derby is bound to be evocative but it also has the potential to prove a watershed for his past and present clubs. While three points would secure Sunderland their second Championship win of the season, and potentially lift them out of the bottom three, a Boro victory would ease the pressure on Garry Monk.
Ten days or so ago, Monk looked in an even more perilous position than Grayson. Despite Steve Gibson, the Boro owner, pledging in pre-season to smash the Championship and a £50m-plus investment in the transfer market, the Teessiders were failing to impress in mid-table.
Viewed in the context that Grayson spent £1.25m in the close season, it represented serious underachievement for a side relegated alongside Sunderland in May. Fortunately for Monk, wins at Reading and Hull in the last week have silenced the dissenters while lifting his team to the verge of the play-off zone.
If the alarmingly porous visiting defence will need to be mindful of the threat posed by Britt Assombalonga, Boro’s record £15m signing, Stockdale knows Monk is still presiding over a tricky philosophical transition. Ripping up the defensive blueprint that became his predecessor Aitor Karanka’s hallmark on Teesside and shifting to a more expansive approach has not been easy and even those two wins have not fully erased the resultant strain.
“Middlesbrough spent an awful lot of money in the summer and there’s pressure on them to go straight back up, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” says Stockdale, who expects to step back into the shadows during the international break, by which time Short should have sifted through the candidatures of, among others, Karanka and Southend’s Phil Brown. “Boro will try and play it down, but when you’ve spent the amount of money they have, you have to be looking to go straight back up.”
Sunderland’s more modest aim is simply staying in the second tier, but Stockdale refuses to subscribe to widespread and long-standing theories about the club’s culture being counter-productive and the lifestyles and commitment of certain players sometimes less than professional.
“You’d have to ask the players if they feel guilty,” he says. “I don’t see a lack of effort from the players but I do see a lack of confidence and maybe quality. The inquest into how it got to this can happen another time … but this wasn’t an impossible job for Sam Allardyce.”

SOURCE : GUARDIAN SPORTS
posted by CAMPUS94