When Sam Allardyce steps out of the tunnel at the Stadium of Light on Sunday he will feel an enormous sense of responsibility.
“There’s hundreds of staff that work here and they would have to be severely cut back if we got relegated,” said Sunderland’s new manager as he prepared for his first home game, which just happens to be a derby against Newcastle United.
“So my responsibility is bigger than just survival. It’s saving people’s jobs, people who have been working here for a long time and love this place. I have a big responsibility to try to make sure their jobs are safe. The fallout from relegation, the devastation, is massive.”
With his team bottom and still seeking their first Premier League win of the season Allardyce is hoping he can choreograph a sixth straight victory over Newcastle while becoming the fourth successive Sunderland manager to beat the Tynesiders in his second game in charge.
If the pressure to extend such extraordinary sequences is not enough, further spice is added by memories of his sacking by Newcastle in 2008 and a reunion with Steve McClaren, the manager who not only beat him to the England job in 2006 but led Middlesbrough to a League Cup victory over Allardyce’s Bolton in 2004.
It will be the 13th time the pair have confronted each other. “It’s four wins, four draws and four defeats each,” he says before playing down suggestions he continues to hold a grudge against Newcastle. “It was the right place at the wrong time for me,” the 61-year-old says with a shrug. “I quickly moved on.”
Allardyce does not entirely buy Gary Neville’s thesis about northern football (Manchester apart) being in potentially terminal decline as the game’s power base shifts south, but he believes it is imperative that both north-east clubs remain in the top division.
“There’s not been a Premier League team in Yorkshire for quite a while apart from Hull, and that’s a real shame,” he says. “There used to be a huge amount, but those days have gone.
“Football in that part of the world has changed. The north-west has really faltered as well. In my time at Bolton there were more Premier League clubs in the north-west than anywhere else, but now it’s sad to see. You really wouldn’t want that to happen up here.
“It’s really important that both Sunderland and Newcastle stay in the Premier League. It’s critical for this part of the world. Both clubs have spent money to try to do that and whether they’ve spent it wisely enough we’ll see. That’s the key element. Recruitment is everything today because, with the money you have to spend on players, if it’s not right it quickly turns against you.”
A crowd of close on 50,000 will fill Sunderland’s home and Allardyce has offered his sometimes mentally fragile players some advice about how to please one of the country’s most passionate audiences. “It’s about showing your commitment, your real passion for the shirt,” he says. “You can talk about possession but fans love excitement.
“They love quality crosses and headed goals. They love shooting, hitting the target and action in both boxes. They don’t love a lot of midfield action, 50 or 60 passes going nowhere.
“I tell players, ‘If you want the fans to cheer you, give them something to cheer about. If you don’t want them to boo, don’t play crap.’ That’s the bottom line. Fans don’t boo on purpose, they only boo when they see what they don’t want to see.”
Despite Newcastle’s 6-2 win against Norwich last Sunday – their first of the season – they remain vulnerable.
Although McClaren has been reciting the “just another game” mantra all week, deep down he knows three points on Wearside on Sunday could help shape his Tyneside tenure.
Unfortunately he is struggling to second-guess Allardyce’s game plan before a contest likely to be punctuated by a series of feisty sub-plots potentially including Lee Cattermole v Cheik Tiote, John O’Shea v Alesandar Mitrovic and Yann M’Vila v Moussa Sissoko. “Sam’s just in and we don’t know what their team will be,” says McClaren. “We’re really in the dark.”
