A rubber bracelet protrudes from the cuff of Sam Allardyce’s smart navy blue tracksuit top. On closer inspection, it is red and white and has clearly been handcrafted with care.
“It’s my lucky loom band from our Ollie,” says the Sunderland manager, pulling a sleeve up and showing his wrist off. “My first red and white one. He said: ‘This is for good luck, granddad’.”
With Sunderland bottom of the table and lacking a Premier League win this season, Allardyce needs every charm going, particularly approaching a Sunday lunchtime when he finds himself under a peculiar sort of pressure.
Sunderland have won the last five derbies against Newcastle United and their new manager could do with making it six against his old club on Sunday. “It’s not just another game, far from it,” says the 61-year-old as he prepares to take his seat in the home dugout for the first time. “It’s one nobody wants to be on the wrong side of. There’s no doubt about that. Losing this game can have a more damning effect on you than losing any other.”
Steve McClaren demurs. The Newcastle manager’s only problem is no one quite buys his “just another game” mantra, let alone a suggestion the sole reason his squad were spending Saturday night in a hotel was the midday kick-off. “We’ve a few characters who probably wouldn’t get up on time otherwise,” he says, joking.
His England ordeal may have thickened McClaren’s skin to the point where he claims he is “beyond embarrassment in football” but no one should underestimate precisely how much he craves success on Tyneside.
Mounting Geordie pessimism swiftly evaporated as Norwich were thrashed 6-2 at St James Park last Sunday but, like Allardyce, the 54-year-old knows multiple hazards must be navigated before relegation worries are finally banished.
Gary Neville recently suggested such woes could simply all be part of northern football’s wider, potentially terminal, decline, with the game’s traditional powerbase (Manchester excepted) eroding as the south’s economic pulling power ensures it becomes English football’s new stronghold.
Allardyce and McClaren disagree. They know that their teams’ current plights stem from bad mistakes in recruitment. They share the view that two clubs attracting some of England’s highest gates and possessing two of the country’s finest stadiums are under-achieving. Yohan Cabaye, for instance, wanted to return to Newcastle this summer. Unfortunately the France midfielder was over 25 and did not fit the club’s policy of buying young players with a high potential re-sale value, so he ended up at Crystal Palace.
This strategy has left McClaren confronted by a dressing room alarmingly light on leadership and experience. Yet if he has his worries, the club’s balance sheet is at least healthily in the black. Whether or not their coaching and recruitment structure represents the right way forward remains debatable but, deeply indebted, Sunderland are strangers to similar certainty. Allardyce is the eighth manager to have worked under the owner Ellis Short in the past seven years as the club have lurched between old school management systems and director of football regimes.
“It’s clear that, somewhere, there’s a massive problem and the club have got to get to the root of it,” says Gary Bennett, Sunderland’s former centre-half turned BBC Radio Newcastle match analyst. “You can’t continually keep changing managers; it’s embarrassing – and they can’t all be bad.
“A big problem is that, like Newcastle, Sunderland have bought the wrong players. Footballers who don’t understand about playing in front of passionate 40,000-plus crowds. Some players are mentally quite weak and they crumble in the north-east. The director of football system hasn’t really worked here.”
It does not help that, like Newcastle’s Ashley, Short is a hands-off, largely London-based, owner and fellow directors lacking football nous have arguably allowed too much power to reside in the dressing room. “You need people on the board who know all about football and footballers and understand what’s going on,” says Bennett. “Sunderland don’t have that.”
Led by Margaret Byrne, the chief executive, the board has, however, shown remarkable vision in launching charity‑cum-commerical projects in Africa and on Wearside. On non-football days the Stadium of Light’s hinterland has become the habitat of men in hard hats and high-visibility jackets. A Hilton hotel is rising fast on former wasteland, in the shadow of Sunderland’s home and an aquatic centre. Soon the £17m Beacon of Light, another key element in the Stadium Park regeneration project, will be under construction. A striking cubed structure, it will become a social and educational community hub.
If it is now possible to envisage a day when the Sheepfolds industrial estate – a grim maze of terraced industrial units and semi-derelict scrapyards flanking one side of the ground – will be similarly transformed but the entire city shudders at the potential economic devastation should Premier League status be forfeited.
There would be considerable financial pain in Newcastle too, with the airport, hotels, restaurants and shops all badly hit. Dominating the skyline and situated in the heart of the city, St James’ Park’s – a long goal kick from Fenwick, John Lewis, five-star hotels, assorted restaurants, leading law firms and the university – creates a slightly deceptive facade concealing Newcastle’s crushing lack of ambition.
Michael Martin, editor of the fanzine True Faith, believes that, as the owner of a club ranked the 19th richest in the world by Deloitte, Ashley should set his sights considerably higher. “It’s all about sell-on values,” he says. “The club markets itself as a stepping stone for players. Why not just build a team?”
Martin questions the received wisdom that players inevitably hanker after moves to London. Certainly anyone touring the expensive enclaves where Newcastle’s squad live would be hard-pressed to identify many differences with their equivalents in Cobham or Harpenden.
If the shopping is the problem, the airport offers frequent flights to those Wag meccas of London, Paris, Barcelona and Dubai. “We’ve got to challenge regional stereotyping,” says Martin. “London’s a fantastic city but there are other great cities in England – Newcastle’s one of them.”
Arguments about the north-east’s geographical isolation do not really wash either. “It doesn’t seem to be a problem to Swansea,” says Martin. “Look at the players they’ve attracted. The difference is Swansea’s board has made a series of very good decisions.”
