ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE:SUNDERLAND CHAIRMAN Niall Quinn has admitted his club will miss Roy Keane's box office appeal. Quinn is delighted with how his compatriot's successor, Ricky Sbragia, has picked up the baton since Keane's departure in December, and is confident he is the right man to take the Black Cats forward.
However, he remains grateful for the profile the former Manchester United captain gave the Wearsiders as he dragged them from the foot of the Championship into the Premier League.
Quinn told the Sunderland Echo: “We needed box office at that time when we were at the bottom of the Championship and at a low ebb, and Roy brought it – and then some! But, at this stage of the journey, I believe that box office is neither here nor there. It’s all about the team now, about improving the side and the results.
“Now doing that is all down to Ricky, but it’s also about how we support Ricky and how we help give him the best chance we can.
“We don’t need the sort of worldwide audience that we originally needed when Roy first took over and we were struggling in the Championship.
“Situations where the world’s media would descend on the place were a major help to us then. I have to admit that Roy Keane’s press conferences, their unpredictability and the box office nature of it, yes, we miss that too.
“But it’s now all about us getting up the table and what we do on the pitch more than anything else. When Roy first came here, it was massive, huge. We were on our knees. But we are now aiming towards our third season in the Premier League and we are moving on.”
Sbragia has quietly gone about the business of easing Sunderland away from the relegation zone since originally replacing Keane on a caretaker business, and Saturday’s 0-0 draw at Arsenal left them in 11th place in the table.
Keane invested heavily in the playing squad – to the tune of more than €78 million in a little more than two years in charge – and Quinn believes the foundation is in place for further progress.
He said: “At the moment, our aim has got to be to somehow get ourselves into the top half of the Premier League. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be saying that, and with the squad that we have now, with their ages and their profiles, it’s not unrealistic.
“One of the big problems we have had here is that we have had three teams in three-and-a-half years. We inherited a team which wasn’t good enough and we added to that to get ourselves out of the division.
“We completely remodelled the team to stay up and we changed it again in the summer hoping to progress, so it has been tricky. No one foresaw Roy and the demise and the six weeks we’d had where we weren’t winning, but we have come through and Ricky needs to be applauded for that.”
