Following Sunderland’s stoppage-time concession of a Virgil van Dijk equaliser at Southampton in early March, Sam Allardyce arrived in the St Mary’s press room, slumped in one of the leather upholstered chairs behind the top table and swore loudly. In the post-match hubbub, it had the effect of a judge’s gavel being bashed. “Who’d want this job, eh?” he inquired, rhetorically. “Who’d want this job after the week I’ve had?”
It was difficult not to laugh and Allardyce was able to muster a wry smile at his own expense. Even by the standards of a club that has for some years been a byword for dysfunction, it had been a chaotic few days. He was already accustomed to life without his most creative player, who had been sacked three weeks previously, just found guilty of child sex offences and was now facing a jail sentence.
Fallout from the case meant that, in the conspicuous absence of Sunderland’s chief executive, Margaret Byrne, Allardyce had been forced to juggle his team’s preparations for their appointment on the south coast with a barrage of questions regarding Sunderland’s hideously misjudged handling of the Adam Johnson affair. They had continued to pick the player despite alarming revelations that Byrne had been made aware of some of his illegal activities shortly after he was charged.
Allardyce was shoved into a hail of bullets as Byrne, who has since resigned, remained resolutely unavailable for comment and did his best to provide answers to a controversy that had not happened on his watch. Facing the press for the second time in three days, he was now on far more familiar territory: trying to make sense of how his team had gifted Southampton a late equaliser and squandered the two points that would have put clear daylight between them and fellow relegation contenders Norwich City.
It was the end of a grim week in the recent history of Sunderland, for whom dramatic escapes from relegation have become the norm rather than the exception. In the past three campaigns they have relied on an unlikely series of end-of-season results to safeguard their top-flight status, a state of affairs that seems unbecoming of a club whose place in the net spend hierarchy suggests they should be comfortably mid-table.
With five games of this season remaining, they find themselves down among the dead men once again. Third from bottom and almost certainly in a straight shootout with Newcastle United and Norwich to secure the last remaining place above the thick black line, a game in hand means their destiny is in their own hands. A return of one win from their past seven games suggests the prognosis is bleak, but they have averaged a point per match and otherwise encouraging performances have been marred by careless lapses that have cost them dearly.
They entertain an Arsenal side on Sunday with problems of their own: fans who are fed up with their club’s comparatively enviable stagnation and overshadowed by a cloud of ennui that prompted thousands of them to find better things to do with their time on Thursday than watch the dismantling of West Brom at the Emirates. Tellingly, this was not some organised protest. They just could not be bothered turning up.
There will be few, if any, empty seats at the Stadium of Light. It is a venue that continues to attract near-capacity crowds, whose raucous enthusiasm in the face of almost inevitable mediocrity is little short of heroic. They have seen Sunderland win four Premier League matches at home this season, half of them against the two teams who sit below them in the table.
The fans have seen eight managers come and go in eight seasons since the club was taken over by the American businessman Ellis Short. They have seen their club buy and sell enough players to leave them comfortably in the top 10 Premier League spenders over the past five years, without ever troubling the top 10 of the actual Premier League. They have not seen their team finish a campaign with more than 39 points in the past three seasons. They deserve better.
The threat of relegation and the financial TV rights-induced hammer blow that comes with it mean no added frisson is required, but the well-documented animosity between Allardyce and Arsène Wenger will give it an extra edge. Allardyce’s appointment in October coincided with the publication of an autobiography in which he derided the Frenchman as an “arrogant” manager who “cannot handle” losing. “The more I wound him up the more I liked it,” he wrote of his time as Bolton manager.
In a spectacular U-turn less than a month later, Allardyce announced that he no longer had an axe to grind with Wenger, revealing that their feud was “just wind-up stuff that we all get up to”. That week, Arsenal beat Sunderland 3-1 in the Premier League, before sweeping them aside by the same score in the FA Cup third round.
While Allardyce may be correct in his well documented view that Wenger’s Arsenal don’t like it up ’em, his uncharacteristic volte-face may be related to the not so well documented fact that he has not masterminded victory over Arsenal in nine attempts since his time as Blackburn manager. With his team battling gamely to avoid the drop, now seems as good a time as any to buck that trend.
