Aside from the squad and their merits and rate of development I think three things in particular are not assisting us at the moment. 1. International breaks. 2. Speculation about the (possible) takeover and uncertainty about how we will look if it does/doesn't come off. 3. Speculation about Hecky's future. 1 and 2 we can do nothing about. But in the event of no takeover we may well revert to being a yoyo club at best. I still think there is a lot of promise in this squad, but we forget how long it took our 2016 'galactico's' to fully develop into the players they became. 3 is also tricky, because if we doubled Hecky's wages he'd still be easy prey for a 'bigger' club. Wednesday would quadruple them without losing sleep. It's not too hard to envisage Hecky leading Sunderland to League One promotion after Coleman has departed. Unfortunately, it seems to me that a lot of roads lead back to the question of the takeover. And that seems out of our control.
If the/a takeover - one which gives us a bit more cash for wages so that we can renew players' contracts, and hence sell the player(s) with more than six months left - does not happen, our future is League One. It is inevitable.
I think any talk of Hecky being courted by other clubs is just that - paper talk. I'm not sure if anyone has actually approached the club with a view to speaking to him. If you put everything aside and just look at our results in this calendar year, he could be replacing a manager who has been sacked for having better stats. That would go down like a lead balloon with other fans, and the pressure would be straight on him. I don't worry about him leaving anytime soon.
Fair, if you look at just results: we've gone from seventh at the New Year, one point off the play-offs, to being one of six or seven teams fighting to stay up. With that in mind, you would not appoint a manager who has overseen such a steep decline in a short space of time. If I were a Sunderland fan, looking purely at the graph of Barnsley's league position between December and now, I'd not want Hecky. We all know the mitigating circumstances, though. It is not the elephant in the room. It's a family of them, and a blue whale, and some giraffes. And a few five-ton dinosaurs. His tactics were wrong last night, and we were crap against Leeds, and so on and so forth. I accept that, and I would like him/the team to do better. The overarching reason for our crapness is because we cannot pay Championship-level wages, and so Championship-level players will generally regard us as a stepping-stone. I see that, sadly, as our reality. On that basis, staying up - which we are on target to do, despite the undeniable crapness of Saturday and last night - must mean our manager is making at least a Primark purse out of a chewed-up sow's ear.
