da betcris： Some squads are teams and others are filled with disperse individual talent. Think of the Germany team that won the World Cup last season, with no obvious stand-out star but lots of top-quality players working together and you think ‘team’.
da 888： By contrast, almost any Real Madrid team of the last decade could be considered a group of talented individuals expensively thrown together.
They’re the two extremes of the same issue, and most teams fall between it. Most teams have a best player, one who stands out, but most are able to integrate him into some sort of team structure. Sunderland, however, don’t seem to have much of a team structure.
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You’d expect that’s the first thing that Sam Allardyce will want to change about Sunderland. It just seems so unlike a Big Sam team to have a collection of individuals who don’t mould together into a team.
But what’s even worse about Sunderland is that it’s not even a lack of team spirit or cohesion that’s the problem, it’s the fact that you can’t even discern the best system to fit all of these players into.
And so the answer isn’t simply a unifying figure in the dugout. It’s not like Big Sam can just come in, unite the dressing room and suddenly Sunderland will start playing. Allardyce will have to come into the side and actually find a way to fit all of these players into the same XI.
The problem is having so many managers over the last few seasons. Allardyce is Sunderland’s third manager since Martin O’Neill left in 2013, and each time, a new man has come into the Stadium of Light with new ideas, brought the club away from the relegation zone, bought new players to start an overhaul of the squad in the summer and then been sacked at some point in the new season with the club fighting relegation again.
Is Sunderland’s novel strategy for beating the drop simply a case of waiting until things are dire and then hoping for the lift that a new manager brings the team in order to climb out of the bottom three? Credit where credit’s due, it’s an inventive one.
But what’s so strange about Sunderland is that they don’t actually have a terrible team. Steven Fletcher is a man on fire for his country in terms of banging in the goals – alright, a hat trick against Gibraltar is nothing to write home about, but he’s the only Scottish player to score a hat trick for the national team since 1969, and he’s done it twice in this qualifying campaign.
But players like Fabio Borini and Adam Johnson, Jack Rodwell and Younes Kaboul are all players who found themselves at clubs in or around the Champions League and failed to make the grade. They’re players with points to prove and Sunderland should be able to take advantage of that.
But the newer signings, Yann M’Vila, Ola Toivonen, DeAndre Yedlin are all in on loan. Yedlin is a frighteningly quick full back, Toivonen a cultured number ten and M’Vila a combative defensive midfielder. Which is fine, except with Larsson, Johnson, Jordi Gomez and Jeremain Lens, you have a midfield that seems to be pulling in a different direction.
There are so many defensive midfielders who have been signed by various managers and so many strikers who have been signed by various managers, and they’ve all been signed for different purposes in mind.
On paper, the squad looks like it’s made up, more or less, of individuals of Premier League quality. But the challenge for Big Sam is whether he can fit them all into one team.
Yet an even bigger challenge is coming up in January. Does Allardyce then go off and try to overhaul the squad in January? Because he can’t get an entire squad sorted in one transfer window. It will take a few to get the right players in and ship the deadwood out. But what happens if he’s sacked in the meantime?
There’s something wrong at Sunderland, and this is it. They need to give Allardyce the time to build the squad properly and make sure that he has a team that all pulls in the same direction. He has a lot of good players at his disposal, he just now needs to find a way to make them into a ‘team’.
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