Grains of fine golden sand lifted by the stiff and somewhat bracing April breeze spear Jan Kirchhoff’s face, stinging his eyes. Sunderland are limbering up for Sunday’s home game against Leicester City on the vast, rather bleak, expanse of Roker beach and passing dog walkers in cagoules gawp at the sight of Sam Allardyce’s 6ft 5in midfielder and his team-mates dodging the incoming tide.
Despite the weather, Kirchhoff is in such a relaxed mood that, at one point, the giant German kneels down and seems to invite Jermain Defoe and friends to help him build a sandcastle. Until January he had never heard of the place and was possibly not too clued up about Allardyce either but now this North Sea outpost is serving as the backdrop for a most unlikely love affair.
Had things proceeded to plan, the 25-year-old would have been playing Champions League football for Bayern Munich this spring but instead Kirchhoff has a new life. “I think it’s the best move I’ve ever made,” he says. “We’re always searching for happiness – and I’m really happy here. Football’s about more than just being successful.”
The once distinctly ersatz defender’s new existence revolves around redefining himself as an incisively intelligent midfielder while endeavouring to keep Allardyce’s team in the Premier League. After that, he will look forward to renewing acquaintance with his former Bayern manager Pep Guardiola next season.
“What do you want – the polite answer or the honest answer?” Kirchhoff asks, winding down from the beach trip and a five-a-side training ground defeat by Sunderland’s under-eights. He has just been asked to assess Guardiola. “Honest? Pep Guardiola’s going to win this league and change this league like you’ve never seen before.
“I’m totally sure. He’s going to build one of the greatest teams at Manchester City and win the league without any trouble. You’re going to see a totally different way of playing. It’s one of the best situations English football’s going to have for a long, long time.”
Kirchhoff feels confident the Spaniard can enhance England’s fortunes. “This is the same situation we had in Germany maybe five years before,” he says. “We had a lot of young, talented, homegrown players getting into our best teams – and these teams had really good coaches: Jürgen Klopp at Dortmund and Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich. And the national team exploded. I don’t think we won the World Cup because of our unbelievable national head coach [Joachim Löw]. I think we won it because of Guardiola and Klopp. It was because these talented players were taking all the football knowledge they’d learnt from their club coaches into the national team.”
There is a caveat. “It depends how many English players Guardiola has at City. But everyone who plays for him will tell you he makes you so much better. You understand this game in a totally different way.
“If Guardiola has a lot of English players they’ll improve and make the England team better. It’s the same with another coach I really like: Mauricio Pochettino. You can already see the influence of Pochettino’s Tottenham on England. All his players know what to do, have a good reading of the game and are so intelligent, technical, unbelievable. I think the whole league’s going to be better for Guardiola and Pochettino – and Klopp at Liverpool.”
Having played for Klopp during his early, highly promising, professional days at Mainz, Kirchhoff is uniquely placed to compare him with Guardiola. “They’re completely different in their personalities and ways of playing,” he says. “But they’re both very good for English football.”
So how does Allardyce match up? Kirchhoff pauses. “Pep’s the best coach in the world for sure so I cannot say Sam’s the best as well! But Sam’s good. His treatment of players, the way he speaks to us, his video analysis, the way he prepares us for games is very good. I’ve had really bad coaches – but he’s a really good coach.”
Allardyce was unfazed by Kirchhoff’s disastrous debut as a substitute centre‑half in a 4-1 January defeat at Spurs. “It was a no-good day, the worst possible start,” says the Frankfurter. “In at least three situations I chose the wrong decision but these things happen. In my mind I was: ‘Forget about it.’”
Since then he has been deployed deep in midfield. Serving as a quasi-sweeper sitting in front of the defence, he breaks up attacks and initiates Sunderland advances with a reassuringly impressive mixture of accuracy and vision.
“When I turned professional I changed from midfield to defence,” he recalls. “People we’re saying: ‘He’s so tall he’s going to be a centre-half.’ But, in defence, I was trying to run with the ball, trying to build the game. In my heart, I was always a midfielder.”
Wherever he played he suffered frequent, and varied, injuries. They derailed a Bayern career that produced only seven first-team appearances, prompting a loan switch to Schalke. It swiftly felt a bad fit.
“I had a lot of problems with my body,” says the former under‑21 international who cost Sunderland only £750,000. “So I’m really happy to be far away in a new environment. I’m really happy to just free my mind. A lot of times, especially at Schalke, I was really unhappy, really uncomfortable.
“We all want to feel comfortable and this is the first time for two and a half years I’m feeling really good. I think you see it in my performances. For a long time I didn’t manage to get so many good performances in a row. Everyone knows I’m a good player but I wasn’t able to bring my ability to the pitch.
“I had lots of injuries at Schalke, lots of problems with my mindset. Schalke was my bad time – and when I returned to Munich I was injured and just doing rehab.”
Sunderland, bolstered by the arrival of Kirchhoff and the similarly influential Wahbi Khazri and Lamine Koné in January, are also in recovery, with the only concern being that their steady improvement may be too slow to save them.
“We were in a situation to win a lot of games lately but lost concentration and got draws,” says Kirchhoff, who sees Claudio Ranieri’s side as a mirror image of Allardyce’s, albeit appreciably more successful. “Leicester pretty much bring the same things to the pitch as us but they keep winning 1-0. It’s something you can’t explain.
“Both teams look to play football the same way. Both of us try to control midfield. Leicester don’t defend to break down attacks, they defend to win the ball and counterattack. That’s what we try to do as well. They’ve done the same things as us, but a little bit better, all season. At the moment they have better players. When you see people like Danny Drinkwater, they’re unbelievable but you wouldn’t have noticed them last year.”
If only Sunderland could borrow some of this momentum. “When you’re on a positive vibe, it just works,” says Kirchhoff, who played alongside Leicester’s then “underrated, maybe under-respected” Christian Fuchs at Schalke. “You don’t have to put so much effort in. Everything happens so easily. It’s unbelievable. Leicester are in that situation now. They’re on a wave and everyone’s over their normal limit but we can beat them. To survive, we have to start winning.”
