‘We need more men who are as hungry as Jake’
CHRIS Coleman says loan signing Jake Clarke-Salter is the template for the kind of player he wants to bring to Sunderland.
Young Chelsea defender ClarkeSalter became Coleman’s first addition this week when he joined the Black Cats in a deal that will see him spend the rest of the season on Wearside,
The 20-year-old is very highly rated, having helped England win the U20 World Cup in October an been part of Chelsea sides that have won the FA Youth Cup three times and the UEFA Youth League twice.
“I’m happy with Jake,” said Coleman.
“I keep on talking about bringing the right type of person to the club, and he’s young, hungry, and he wants to achieve.
“He’s a really good boy as well.
“If you look at his career so far, albeit it with the U23s and with the England youth teams, he has achieved some amazing things, really.
“It was the right time for him to come out on loan and we felt that we were the right club. So did Jake, and I am really pleased he is going to be spending some time with us until the end of the season.”
Sunderland’s financial situation is such that Coleman will be reliant on the loan market during the January transfer window, unless he can sell players to generate some limited funds. But even if he had money burning a hole in his pocket, Coleman insists he would still stick to his principles in terms of signing the right characters – something which Sunderland have not always done in the past, when panic buying has led them to overpay for substandard players, and which has left the club in trouble both on and off the field.
Coleman said: “Immediately you feel here what type of club it is, and the difficulty it is in.
“It has had a lot of turnover in terms of players in and out, it has spent a lot of money on players and it hasn’t quite worked out, so we need to be realistic about where we are.
“The reality is that at this moment we can’t spend millions of pounds on people anyway.
“But even if we could, the principle would be the same – trying to bring the right personality to the club. For us in this window, we want to bring in some more faces, obviously, but also concentrate on the mentality of the player who comes into this dressing room.
“He needs to be of the right mentality to try to help what we have already got.
“It’s not easy because there are other clubs who are in a similar predicament to us who want to take loan players – so it is a bit of a dogfight.
“I think Jake is a good start for us and there are still two, three, or four more I would like to do before the end of the transfer window.”