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My immediate feeling having heard what David Moyes had to say about his job as Sunderland manager was of positivity.
As anxious as I am for us to start rolling out new signings - especially with the first game of the season just around the corner - Moyesy did much to allay my fears about the current transfer predicament at the club.
And don't get me wrong, I didn't for one minute think that Martin Bain and Ellis Short have been sitting on their hands and refusing to sign players. I did, however, worry about our policy on spending, and perhaps our reluctance to overspend slightly in the wake of the influx of cash that has seen record levels of spending already in the Premier League.
DM: The FA had been talking to Sam for three or four weeks. I don't know if you can really do much business in that period.
You've got to give us a wee bit of grace on that. It does take a bit of time, but we'll make it work. We'll get signings in.
It's an important point that Moyes makes there - who is going sign for us when we don't know who the manager is going to be?
He took over the club just over a week ago, has spent that time assessing the players and working closely with them and, now that we are home, he can fully focus on strengthening the team.
Clearly, we are going to have to be patient, as Moyes explains:
DM: It's not as easy now as it was before. You're not going to change it in one transfer window and if we are a bit late in the transfer window we'll do the best we can.
What we want to try to do is get the right players at the right price, like we did in the early days (at Everton). Players who we think can go the journey with us.
And I did think that would be the case. If we go in for our top targets now it might cost us more than it will towards the end of August and, whilst that isn't what we want to hear, it's probably going to be the period when we do the majority of our business.
Two players that have been repeatedly linked with the club since Moyes arrived are Adnan Januzaj and Marouane Fellaini, and the new gaffer was fairly coy on the subject:
DM: If any of those good players want to join me I'd be happy to have them. They're excellent players. We're interested but I'm sure there's a load of other clubs that are as well.
We're interested in lots of good players. You have to have a realistic view.
There'll be some players we can attract just now and some players we can't. We'll try and get the ones we can and the ones who want to come here and start on the new journey we're on.
I'm sure we're interested in loads of players, but David is right - if someone like Fellaini is available, we won't be the only ones after him and we have to be realistic with our chances. We'll have targets that are perhaps going to be more easily persuaded to join the club than someone as high-profile as Fellaini is, and it's likely that those players will be the first ones we see come through the door.
The best thing I took from Moyes' brief appearance in front of the cameras is his ambition to succeed at Sunderland, noting the job he did at Everton in taking them from the bottom of the Premier League to becoming a side that finished regularly in the top eight as something he's aiming to replicate on Wearside.
He said:
DM: I think I've got the fourth best winning record in the Premier League of all managers. That's what I want to bring to Sunderland. I need players and I need teams that give me an opportunity to do that.
I don't want to lose that record, in fact I want to better it. The job is to win the games. At the start we may have to win a few ugly but as we go along I hope it will become more exciting.
This has got to be a building job. Hopefully I'm here for four years and I'll try and bring a level of stability to the club. This reminds me a little bit of Everton when I took over. Everton had been in the bottom six, I think, four out of the five years before I came in.
In my last eight years I never finished outside the top eight. Hopefully we can do a bit of an Everton.
It's nice to see a Sunderland manager come out and show some ambition and set some goals that don't include saving us from relegation, and I suppose the things Moyes has said today gives us an ideal opportunity to reflect upon where we find ourselves this summer.
We now start with a clean slate, and Moyes can now build upon the foundations that have been left behind by Sam Allardyce. He's not promising miracles, but he is telling us that we are going to be more ambitious on the pitch, and to me that is significant.
All in all, I was impressed with what the manager had to say. He wasn't going to come out and reveal loads of behind closed doors secrets but he did reassure us that we are doing everything right in order to make us a better football club.
That's all that any of us want, isn't it?
