This year’s relegation is the hardest to take and losing duo was key to demise
The season has finally ended – although it seems to have been over for months – and with it 10 consecutive years of Premier League football.
It is not the first time we have suffered the drop from the top flight, in fact no club has more than our four Premier League relegations, but this one has hit me the hardest simply because it should never have happened.
Even allowing for the disruption of Sam Allardyce’s departure during the important pre-season period, we had still finished the previous season strongly and had the nucleus of what most people thought a midtable team.
That is why I don’t understand why some people are saying it was inevitable we would be relegated. It wasn’t.
Before this season I didn’t talk to one Sunderland fan who thought we’d go down, not in my circle of friends or fans I just bumped into.
So many things went wrong that contributed to our demise, but for me the rot set in when we couldn’t – or wouldn’t – hold on to two key players; Younes Kaboul and Yann M’Vila.
It led to the needless break up of a promising team and immediately weakened two areas, the back four and the midfield and also affected the form of Kaboul’s centre-back partner Lamine Kone, who hasn’t looked the same player alongside anybody else.
When every other club was strengthening their team, Sunderland were dismantling and weakening theirs by letting go good players and bringing in inferior ones.
The now departed David Moyes was parachuted into the job late and couldn’t possibly know the players as well as Allardyce, who had worked with them day in, day out but Moyes still had a full season so he can’t say he didn’t have time.
Of the players I can think of there are only three – Jermain Defoe, Jordan Pickford and Didier Ndong – who can be satisfied with their season.
Some will claim injuries, others that they didn’t get a fair shake from the manager but they are just excuses.
It is what footballers do but deep down they will all know, that they could have been so much more.
Nobody comes out of a relegation blameless.
They all have to take responsibility, unfortunately the ones that truly are blameless are the ones behind the scenes who have paid the price with their jobs.