#SAFC v #AFCB "Ah, you are assuming he has a gameplan?" A sceptical Pete Sixsmith from @salutsunderland speaks https://t.co/WGqup3ZvQW pic.twitter.com/BklLZognk4
— The South End (@TFTSE) April 28, 2017
Steve Menary, a Bournemouth ‘Who are You?’ interviewee last season, asked if we could reciprocate by answering a few questions for his Tales from the South End site. Pete Sixsmith was pressganged into service …
STEVE MENARY: Sunderland look to have an impossible task to stay up this season. Do you think it is still possible?
Sixer: No. Relegation is a certainty and has been since Southampton won 4-0 at The Stadium of Light in the depths of winter. The team is poor, the players are desperate to get away and the manager has been a catastrophe.
To have any chance of staying up Sunderland have to beat Bournemouth. How do you think Sunderland will line-up to try and get a win?
They will make a couple of changes from the debacle at Middlesbrough on Wednesday night but it will not make one iota of difference. Rodwell will come in for Gibson, Love for Jones and that’s it. It is a very poor squad, top heavy with former Evertonians and players who have failed at Sunderland on a consistent basis.
Which AFC Bournemouth player(s) will Moyes be targeting in his matchday game plan?
Ah, you are assuming he has a game plan are you? He will probably mumble that we have to pick up King and try and stop Pugh but by then the players will be playing with their phones or dreaming of a transfer in the summer.
We would love to have Jermain Defoe back at AFC Bournemouth. Do you think he will leave if you go down?
That’s about as certain (and as unfortunate) as Theresa May winning the General Election. Bournemouth is a possible destination for him. He looks as if he has had enough of Sunderland now (I know how he feels) and hasn’t scored for nine games.
Will Moyes stay if Sunderland are relegated? Or, more to the point do you want him to stay?
The owner and the CEO are on record as saying that he will. His pride may make him hang on but he is so unpopular with a large section of the 40,000 who have turned up every week that he may yet change his mind.
Sunderland’s recent home record very much matches AFC Bournemouth’s recent away record. What do you think the score will be?
I would expect Bournemouth to win this one. It pits an intelligent, ambitious and flexible young coach against David Moyes who, as he keeps reminding us, has the fourth best winning record in the Premier League. If you are there, be prepared for an unpleasant atmosphere as the (relatively) small crowd persistently calls for the Scotsman to “get hisself awae hame” – only it will not be that polite
Prediction: 0-2
A sad, pathetic end to a sad pathetic season for a sad pathetic club (fans excluded) and manager.
Moyes is not the man to breath a new vibrant can do club attitude so if he stays then we all know what we will get next season.
However even if he does decide to walk, Short is not the man to make a good appointment, whoever that may be.
I suspect a rather depressing future is waiting just round the corner for the long suffering support and it couldn’t come at a worst time with a Chairmen itching to sell the Club how can we attract players or managers, and a droll Scotsman who looks not to be up to the task in the hand.
Now is the winter of our discontent!!!!!!!
Moyes is getting a lot of stick and may well go at the end of the season, if not before, but the real villain of the piece is Roy Hodgson who was so pathetic in the Euros that it was inevitable that when Allardyce went so would our chances of consolidating our top flight status.
Fans have short memories. The clamour for Martin O’Neill didn’t change the fortunes of the club and a majority of supporters felt Moyes was the best man to take us forward. Neither worked out but I’m not sure a change of manager will do us any good either. I’m not defending Moyes’s record nor his lack of success in motivating the team.
That was one area where Allardyce excelled. The other was in making the influential signings in his January transfer window. Would we be in the same situation now with him in charge? Possibly not but I’m not sure he would have been able to strengthen the team significantly and he may well have been disillusioned with the club had he stayed. I don’t think he would have got the players he wanted.
Now and again a club and a manager seem like a perfect fit – at least for a time and Allardyce was ours. Our club needs a complete overhaul otherwise any manager will end up as the scapegoat.
Moyes does appear to have lost his enthusiasm and to my amateur eye looks like a man suffering with depression. Roy Keane ended up the same way and Steve Bruce was just frustrated.
I fear we could see years of struggle before we start to see any real progress. The chance was there 12 months ago but that window of opportunity has been and gone.