Saturday’s relegation showdown between Norwich City and Sunderland offers the Premier League’s youngest manager, 34-year-old Alex Neil, the opportunity to guide his team towards safety in a particularly satisfying and symbolic way: by pushing the league’s great survivor, Sam Allardyce, towards an unprecedented demotion.
Norwich go into the game four points above Sunderland but having played one match more. Their last home match saw Neil’s team seize three valuable points at the expense of Newcastle United, a side whose manager, Rafael Benitez, has won the Champions League and began the season in charge of Real Madrid. But Sunderland represent a bigger challenge. Allardyce is a 61-year-old salvage expert who has never been relegated from the top flight and, what is more, Sunderland have developed a culture of escapology, having made late dashes for safety in each of the past three seasons under various managers. Whereas Benítez and Newcastle’s expensive players did not seem mentally attuned to a relegation fight when they pitched up at Carrow Road full of intricate plans and costly jitters, Sunderland should be more battle-hardened.
Neil, not big on self-aggrandisement, is loath to bill the match as a duel between him and Allardyce. The Scot neither overstates nor understates his role in Norwich’s promotion from the Championship last season and their attempt to stay in the Premier League this season.
“It’s hard to quantify how much influence you have over your group,” he said. “I played for 12-13 years and never came off thinking: ‘The manager made me play well.’ You get them organised and prepared as best you can but then it’s up to them to play well. The players will be fully aware of my expectations for this game but they also know what their own expectations are. It means a lot to all of us.”
Many of Neil’s players have been at Carrow Road longer than him and were part of the Norwich team that dropped out of the Premier League two years ago as Sunderland survived late on. Under Neil, however, Norwich’s players have won the matches that have mattered most. “In my short time here I’ve found myself on the right side of these things more often than not,” he said. “Sometimes fear can cripple you as a player but it’s certainly not going to do that to us on Saturday. You have to relish these matches.”
Neil will feel even more confident if he is able to field Timm Klose. The Swiss centre-back has become the cornerstone of Norwich’s defence since joining from Wolfsburg in January but his place is in doubt following the knee injury he suffered at Crystal Palace last week.
Klose has barely trained all week but, if he is fit enough to play, then Neil will not hesitate to name him in his starting line-up, with the manager comparing Klose to great defenders such as Ledley King and Paul McGrath insofar as he has the ability to perform well without training: “If your reading of the game is good and you’re dominant in the air, then training becomes less important than it is for other players.”
If Klose does not make it, Sébastien Bassong is likely to start and Norwich supporters may be less optimistic about their team’s capacity to subdue the visitors’ sharpest shooter, Jermain Defoe, who has scored 15 league goals this season, five times as many as any other Sunderland players.
Norwich have also found goals difficult to come by, with none of their players hitting more than five in the league. But Neil expects his team to shoot more accurately than Sunderland in a duel that he thinks will end in a fusillade. “Both sides will be relatively cagey in the first half but it wouldn’t surprise me if the second half is very different,” he said. “Because depending on the situation, one or other of the sides is going to have to go for it.” And only one of them can survive.
