Fan Letters: Sunderland’s development has accelerated!
After our fantastic victory at Wembley, there was a lot of conjecture about how many new players we would need to make our club competitive in the Premier League. Very few, if any, predicted that it would be fourteen, and nobody ever imagined that we would sign them for £160 million and then be able to see them win six points from three games to move us into a European spot!
The tragic dissolution of the promotion squad, however, is a drawback to all of this excitement. Even before kickoff, Jobe and Tommy Watson were virtually gone, but poor Paddy Roberts was the first to depart when he didn’t want to. After Régis Le Bris registers his 25-man squad and loses many of the men who brought us here in the first place, there will probably be a few more. We’re all going to feel horrible about the process, which is still in its early phases. Unfortunately, if we want to have any chance of our goals coming true, we’ll have to grow used to watching good guys move on.
Perhaps this is the reason for the twenty-five players in the first place. Our team will require two Premier League-ready players to cover every position, in addition to a third custodian and two utility players. The need that eight of these be “homegrown” presents a challenge, and it’s surprising that nationality isn’t taken into account given that players must only be registered with an English club for three seasons prior to turning 21 in order to be eligible. U21s are not included in this group because they are able to play for the first team without being registered. This season, Eliezer Mayenda, Noah Sadiki, and Chemsdine Talbi are all eligible; obviously, having U21s prepared for the Premier League is a significant plus.
Le Bris’ ability to select his finest 25 players is something I don’t envy, and I believe it would be a mistake to select eight guys just because they are “homegrown.” They also have to be good enough, and I’m concerned that Simon Moore, Dennis Cirkin, Aji Alese, and Dan Neil might fall into that group. Each team’s performance will be determined by the calibre of these players, and as elite teams typically play sixty games a season, each member of the 25-man roster needs to be the best they can afford.
We need to continuously assess our team and use the transfer windows to gradually bolster it. Players will eventually leave because someone else can do it even better, not because they did something wrong! As spectators watch their favourites being changed on a daily basis, it will take a lot of getting used to the extreme ruthlessness required to accomplish this. Is being at the top of the league worth this much? Most likely! Go, boys!
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