Emmet Malone On Soccer
It's now half a century since Sunderland assembled a squad so expensive they became known everywhere as the Bank of England club. Rumour had it they had spent a million pounds, unthinkable money back in the 1950s, to try and win the league.
Instead, things went badly wrong and, to the amusement of a nation, they were relegated to the old Second Division.
There have been quite a few ups and downs since, but for the last couple of weeks the team now managed by Mick McCarthy have been preparing for life in the top flight again. The ground has changed and even the football bears little enough relation to what was produced 50 years ago. But some things remain the same.
The passion for the club in the town remains as strong as ever with 50,000 turning out for the street party that followed promotion, and then there's the money . . . the team assembled by McCarthy - this week named Philips Manger of the Month - after more than 20 stars had to be offloaded cost that same magical £1 million to assemble.
Few supporters could have expected such a swift return to the Premiership when it emerged a couple of years back that the spending that accompanied the latter part of Peter Reid's reign had left the club hugely in debt and haemorrhaging cash due to an annual £30 million wage bill.
The debt now stands just short of £40 million, but the wages have been halved as most of the saleable big earners have been shown the door to be joined by those whose contracts have expired. In their places has come an array of next-to-nobodies assembled by McCarthy with the help of Ian Evans and, particularly, Dave Bowman, a long-time associate of the manager. Bowman appears to have a gift for spotting players and he is said to have played a highly significant role in bringing players like Liam Lawrence (soon to be the owner of an Irish passport) from Mansfield, Andy Welsh from Macclesfield and Stephen Caldwell from Leeds for next to no money.
Some idea of the seriousness with which the club now weigh up their spending is provided by the arrival of Neil Collins. Dumbarton wanted £25,000 for the Scot, roughly a week's wages for Phil Babb when he was at the club, but it took McCarthy and his coaches several visits to Scotland before they decided to take the plunge.
A handful of players continue to earn very large sums thanks to contracts signed under former regimes, but with chairman Bob Murray trying to reel things in on the financial side, the maximum wage for the everybody else this year was £5,000 a week.
A few big names departed rather than take the required pay-cuts when their deals ran out, but among those glad of the money in a tightening market was Gary Breen who earned roughly four times that during his year at West Ham.
Breen has looked good value this year, playing 40 games in the Championship-winning campaign and looks set to play an important part next year. With Marcus Stewart gone and Michael Bridges transfer-listed, Stephen Elliott will be the club's most prominent striker next year if reinforcements aren't signed.
His arrival, at the prompting ofBowman and Evans for (all add- ons now fulfilled) £375,000, has perhaps been the club's best bit of business over the past year with the Irish striker, who scored 16 goals in just over 40 games, now worth a multiple of that figure. Seán Thornton's future is less certain since being transfer- listed due almost certainly to his antics off the pitch.
The swiftness of McCarthy's decision to release the club's top scorer, Marcus Stewart, after promotion was assured shows he is no longer the sentimentalist some of his decisions while at the helm with Ireland suggested.
Promotion brings with it increased revenues of at least £20 million and McCarthy heard how much of that he will have to spend on players last week when he met with Bob Murray.
McCarthy says he wants to bring in eight new faces and the plan is to "do a Bolton on it" - sign decent players on free transfers, and make provision to get rid of them again in the event the club is relegated. Recent history suggests that is a distinct possibility and even a repeat of West Brom's last-gasp survival will be viewed as success.
McCarthy looks ready for the challenge even if the swift decline in his humour when asked about Roy Keane towards the end of a less than gruelling radio interview with Eamonn Holmes suggests he is no better equipped to handle the increased media attention.
