SAGA OF CLUB’S FAILURE
WHAT’S great about this kind of football documentary series, where cameras spend a whole season at a particular club, is that no-one can ever be sure how things will turn out.
Season One of Sunderland ’Til I Die, which covered the 2017-18 season, was surely intended to be an upbeat affair, at least to begin with.
This proud club, relegated from the Premier League at the end of the previous campaign, was bound to bounce straight back, right?
Horror
So what a privilege it would be to follow it every single step of the way.
Except it didn’t quite pan out that way.
Instead, the makers found themselves with front-row seats for an absolute horror story.
The Black Cats did indeed escape that division at the first time of asking, but not exactly via the route they’d intended.
In April 2018, the club was relegated for the second year on the trot. As is traditionally the case when stuff goes monumentally pear-shaped, it made grimly compelling viewing. Except for Sunderland fans, obviously.
So what came next? Well, this did. The cameras returned to cover 2018-19, with the club now battling to escape from League One.
Not surprisingly, this new sixparter starts with one hell of a shake-up. In comes a new owner, Stewart Donald. In comes a new executive director, Charlie Methven. In comes a new manager, Jack Ross.
And out go a shedload of players, some of them still on Premier League salaries.
Making the biggest initial impact on screen is the fiercely no-nonsense Methven. If Sunderland’s ★★★
staff aren’t aware just how desperate things have become from a commercial point of view, he gathers some key personnel for a meeting.
He then scrawls a bunch of numbers on a flip chart and explains it to them really quite succinctly.
“It is a failed, f***ed-up business,” he declares. “Unless you guys understand that, you’ll never f***ing make it in this world.” – MW
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