Even Conte would not have kept my team up

DESPITE TAKING SUNDERLAND DOWN DAVID MOYES INSISTS...

‘I didn’t know the club was being put up for sale’

‘My record will stand up to anybody’s’

DAVID MOYES will admit to some mistakes. In hindsight he would not have suggested quite so early into last season that Sunderland were going to struggle to remain in the Premier League. And he sincerely regrets those remarks to a female BBC reporter. When he apologised to Vicki Sparks, he meant it.

But when invited to finally have a go back, when given the opportunity to blame anyone but himself for a campaign that ended in such bitter disappointment, there is a decency about Moyes that stops him firing a few bullets. ‘At the end of the day I was the manager who got them relegated,’ he says.

It is far from the whole story, of course, and in his first interview since resigning as Sunderland’s manager last May he does offer some insight into the problems he encountered. Problems, Moyes reveals without naming names, that included certain players feigning injury to avoid being selected.

He also says he would not have taken the job had he been aware of the club’s dire financial situation. He is honest enough to concede that his own ‘due diligence should have been better’.

But had he realised Ellis Short had plans to sell the club and would be unable to provide him with any money in the January transfer window, he would have politely declined the American’s job offer. Again, however, Moyes expresses no real anger towards Short when he says he is sympathetic to the fact that the owner had already pumped £300million of his own money into the club and now wanted out.

It is one of the reasons why Moyes chose not to send in his lawyers to negotiate a severance deal when he decided to quit. He could have pointed to the assurances he was given prior to taking the job; to the fact he had a four-year contract. But on a point of ‘principle’ he just walked. ‘I knew that 70 people had been made redundant and I was choosing to resign,’ he says.

‘For that reason I thought it was best to walk away without a pay-off. Those people had had to leave the club.’

His reflection on a most difficult year, perhaps the most difficult he has had to endure despite his experiences at Manchester United and at Real Sociedad, is calm and measured.

Even if there is a sense of frustration when it comes to the criticism he received for saying quite so soon that his team were in a relegation battle. It was August 21, after all. ‘I think I would rather not have said it,’ he says. ‘But at the same time I’d always rather be honest.

‘We’d just lost to Middlesbrough and had a couple of difficulties picking the team. When people ask me why I said it, they need to realise it was actually a direct question in a press conference after the game. The reaction surprised me a little bit because all I was doing was speaking honestly.’

Clearly he could have said more. There were rumours that at least one player had refused to play in that particular game, just as such rumours resurfaced around the final game of the season against Chelsea, by which time Sunderland had already been relegated. ‘They didn’t refuse to play,’ says Moyes of the Chelsea game. ‘But there were players who didn’t play. But I could also say there were players at other times of the season who didn’t play. It was more to do with attitude. I wouldn’t name the players. Players were injured, or not available for that game. But nobody refused.’ But players said they were injured when perhaps he thought they weren’t. ‘Yeah,’ he replies. ‘ But there were other games when players, for different reasons, weren’t playing. That was more at the start of the season. I think you’re disappointed. I think then you start to think “this is wrong”. But people only see what happens on a Saturday.’ Difficult players are easier to deal with if you have the financial muscle to buy and sell. At Sunderland, however, Moyes was virtually powerless to act.

‘It was a tough season,’ he says. ‘Not what I expected. And it was disappointing because I wasn’t able to get the results that maybe in years gone by I would have done. But I think there were mitigating circumstances.

‘It was a squad that was not at Premier League level. And a squad that had been beaten up a few times and come very close to relegation before. It needed refreshing, but it wasn’t possible because of the finances we had available. I don’t feel let down by Ellis Short because he had always wanted me. He had been after me four or five times.

‘I think the disappointment was that I didn’t know the club was going to be put up for sale. I only found that out two or three months into the job, after we found out there was not going to be any money available in January. ‘Ellis spoke to me a couple of times and said, “look, I’ve already put 300million of my own money into this and there’s not going to be any more”. But I didn’t know that beforehand and I wouldn’t have taken the job had I known.

‘I wasn’t aware of all the issues Sunderland had — the amount of debt, the players they had to pay back, I wasn’t aware of that. And I wasn’t aware of the detail in some of the contracts players had, in terms of being able to leave and so on. Having said that, maybe it was my job to do better due diligence, even if it can be difficult to persuade a club to open up their books to you and say “this is what we’ve got”.’

Relegation, nevertheless, remains on his record, and what amounts to another chastening period at a club. But Moyes’ belief in himself remains unchanged, as does his confidence in his methods. ‘I think Harry Redknapp got it right when he said Antonio Conte couldn’t have kept up Sunderland last season,’ he says.

‘Look at Manchester United. It’s taken them a few hundred million to get them in a good order. At Real Sociedad, we kept them up, we did the job we had to do there. The only one that looks a little bit out of sync is Sunderland. And it was probably the hardest to take. I think my record of losing two games in a row was minimal.

‘ I’d go back to the training ground, find a way. But last year I couldn’t get it to work, and it was getting me down because I was losing. That was my first relegation and I hope it’ll be my last.’

The controversy that surrounded his off- camera comments to Sparks, a veiled threat to give her a ‘slap’ should she ask him such difficult questions again, only added to his problems at a critical time. ‘It was a difficult point and I regret it and I apologised to the reporter,’ he says. ‘ She accepted the apology.’

Has it damaged his reputation? ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘ Everybody knows I’ve been married 30 years, I’ve got a daughter who once played football for Preston North End. I was a footballer for a long, long time. But I should have done better and I should have spoken better.’

As for his reputation as a football manager, he also argues it remains untarnished by the failure to keep Sunderland up.

‘I think that would be wrong,’ he says. ‘I think my last game was 499 games as a Premier League manager. I’ve maybe got 880 or 890 as a manager in total. I think my record will stand up as well as anybody’s.’

But perhaps he should have built on that record by following Rafa Benitez’s example at Newcastle and guiding Sunderland back to the Premier League.

‘I looked at what Newcastle had done to get back up,’ he says. ‘They had been the biggest spenders in the January before they got relegated. They also spent big in the summer to get back up. I had gone to Ellis with a plan of how to get back up if we got relegated and it had an illustration of what Newcastle had done. But he said he wouldn’t be able to fund it, he didn’t have the money.

‘In the end my decision to resign was both difficult and easy. Ellis’s response made up my mind but at the same time it was difficult because of where I had come from; the way I had been brought up by my dad — you don’t give jobs up, you don’t do that.’

He wants another job now, though. ‘ There’s a sense of wanting to get it right,’ he says. ‘I want that winning feeling again.’