Moyes is the Energy Vampire
David Moyes has to learn he cannot just suck the life out of clubs
FROM Psycho to Calamity James, certain football nicknames draw an instant nod of recognition.
So take a bow the ex-Sunderland player who christened David Moyes “The Energy Vampire” – anyone who studied the Scot’s funereal words and body language this season would agree that moniker captures him to a T.
There’s a fine line in football between keeping wild optimism in check and suffocating all hope. Players have to go into a season believing they’ll do well because that is the least their supporters demand in exchange for signing up for nine months of nerve-shredding anxiety.
So when Moyes said last August that any Sunderland fans fearing a relegation battle “would probably be right,” the suicidal die was cast.
The season was only two games old and the transfer window still open, yet he’d come out with a quote that would deter any potential signings and create a defeatist mindset among his own fans and staff.
When the next transfer window came along, the vampire kept sucking. “I’d be kidding you if I said the players we bring in are going to make a big difference,” he said.
As uplifting speeches go, it was down there with a Death Row inmate being told he could have extra chips with his final meal.
In February, after taking four points from two games, Moyes played down any hope of a run to safety by saying: “Maybe we’re a club that doesn’t find it easy when expectation rises. Maybe we’re better when we’re backs to the wall a little bit.”
When Everton visited the Stadium Of Light in September, he boasted in his programme notes how he’d lifted his old club from relegation candidates to regular top-eight finishers.
Then he fired a warning shot at Evertonians excited by having a new owner with money. “With that comes increased expectation,” he wrote.
In other words, a club needs to know its place and not go believing it’s something it’s not, by embracing that delusional emotion called expectation.
Which makes you realise how impossible his job was at Manchester United, where expectations are off the scale every season.
The current manager, Jose Mourinho, often plays the mission impossible card but it’s done to protect his own players and lull opponents into believing they’re struggling when they’re not.
Whatever happens now for Moyes he has to learn that you can’t suck the life out of clubs with doom-laden prophecies that inevitably become self-fulfilling. Defeatism spreads like a rash through football clubs, especially when it comes from the man paid to bring victories.
His current hesitation in committing to seeing out his contract only confirms the suspicion that last summer he thought he was doing the club a big favour by joining.
And his strategy was to play down expectations, just as he did at Everton, in the hope he would be hailed a managerial genius if he over-achieved.
Sunderland is still a big club and Moyes should think twice about walking away.
Not least because potential employers might see his past year’s work as a classic example of how to wreck confidence at a struggling club.
And apply an updated twist to The Energy Vampire’s earlier nickname.
The Unlikely To Be Chosen One.