Mick McCarthy warned Chris Coleman how hard the Sunderland job would be
SunSport columnist casts her eye down into the Championship where she says ex-Wales boss took gig to prove he can cut it
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MICK McCARTHY says he has no pity for ailing Sunderland.
McCarthy, who led the club to the Championship title in 2005 before things turned sour, said: “I had it myself. It’s like trying to turn round an oil tanker with a canoe paddle in your hand.”
The Ipswich manager, like many a son of Yorkshire, is an expert purveyor of gloomy truths.
This one came as no comfort to Chris Coleman, who knew even as he journeyed from Wales in November to become leader at the Stadium of Light that he was embarking on one heck of a job.
This was brave in a way because he had done a lot for the principality’s football reputation.
Trying to regenerate the Black Cats was perhaps also an act of bravura self-confidence, a need to show that he could succeed where a number of proven managers — such as Steve Bruce, Martin O’Neill, Dick Advocaat and West Ham boss David Moyes — had suffered varying degrees of short-term agony.
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No doubt Ellis Short is a good businessman. His years as owner of Sunderland must disappoint him.
Indeed it must have been as frustrating to him as those fans who wondered just how many lives their cats could have near the dustbin of the Premier League before finally, nine months ago, being slung out of the back door.
I have a good deal of sympathy for Short. It is not easy to battle against the tidal pull of relegation.
And, while swapping management seats in the equity fund he built would be, for him, a relatively straightforward task, doing it in a football club is an entirely different experience.
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He tried very hard, I’m sure, to satisfy the supporters, those tens of thousands of faithful Mackems.
On Saturday, with 27,909 in the stands, they drew the fourth-highest attendance in the division. There are so many traps new owners have to dodge, a book could be written.
In the flush of having your very own Premier club, you have to reject paying long contracts with huge wages.
Oh, yes, I’ve been there. Your team goes down and the player insists that you stick to his contract — in the case of Jack Rodwell, £70,000 a week.
And sacking a sound manager after a bad run may work a little miracle for a few weeks.
But if the playing staff has holes in it, the miracle soon grows weary and you’re where you were before — needing repairs to be made by a new man.
Short has gone from the chief who wanted all the answers the day before yesterday to one who has left his £50million home in Chelsea to live in Florida where he can’t often be reached.
It is ironic that he built his fortune by investing in distressed real estate assets because that’s very much what the Stadium of Light is at the moment.
The Mackems are praying Coleman can paddle the oil tanker to safety.