Fan Letters: Sunderland will continue to appoint defensive managers with poor financial backing

Dear Roker Report,

Is League One really the worst thing ever?

Short wants rid of the club. To make it more attractive to prospective buyers he needs to clear our unsustainable debt, hence Martin Bain.

Bain is not a footballing CEO - he is there purely to manage the debt crisis.

He will appoint managers who are going to accept that they will have almost no financial backing, thus a procession of the defensively-minded will undoubtedly be put in place over the next few years with the instruction of 'don't get relegated'.

We will most likely get relegated.

Fans will vote with their feet, players will crumble over every mistake the team makes and we will continue to be the laughing stock of football.

Could this be, however, the final burst of flames which hides the Phoenix-like metaphor which our club has been crying out for for a long time?

We lie somewhere around 10th in the all-time net transfer spend table for the Premier League with very little to show for it.

For too long we have had to shell out fortunes in wages on players who aren't worth it, because how else do you attract players to a relegation battle in the north of England? Fading starlets and ageing greats trying to eek out a couple more seasons of top flight football, plus obscure transfers from the continent with little success.

I believe that the catastrophe we currently see before us is a necessity.

In one, maybe two years time we could be in League One. But we will be free of debt, we could have an owner that actually supports the club and we will be ready to begin the renaissance from the ashes.

We can promote a manager from within (Arca, Ball, or Kevin Phillips) to carry forward a sense of culture. By which time we will have done away with most of our more disinterested players. It will be a gentler introduction into management than the current baptism of fire they would most likely receive and we can build.

Look at Leicester, Southampton, Burnley - teams who have climbed the pyramid without making deals with the devil.

Jay Hughes

Photo by Chris Brunskill/Getty Images

Dear Roker Report,

From the outside looking in, there appears to be a culture amongst the players at Sunderland that they are untouchable, that they do not need to put in the effort to earn their places in the team and retain their contract with the club.

The way the players got Di Canio the sack over his attempts to make them more professional, for example in their dietary intake, for me, is a key point in time where the players became the most important voice in the team.

The Manager should have the respect of the players - if he doesn't, they are not going to perform. Too many of the players are all too aware that the Manager has no sway over the board.

The only way I can see the team getting out of its current mess is to bring in a new manager who is young and hungry and give them the power to remove players from the team, even if it means terminating contracts or giving established senior pros (not that they are being very professional at the moment) free transfers in January.

It would free up wages and allow us to bring in top players from lower leagues and the Championship who are hungry to succeed, rather then rejects from EPL teams who haven't played for six months due to injury or poor performances.

We got rid of a number of players in the summer but the likes of O'Shea, Gibson, Cattermole, Kone, etc. are still here and they lack the heart and desire to put their bodies on the line for the club. I would also put many of the current coaching staff into that bracket too.

Then there are the likes of Williams, McManaman and Wilson, who've had so little game time in the last year that it will take them until January before they are actually fit enough to compete - at their former clubs they were either not good enough or always injured, which has obviously had a knock-on effect with their recent performances.

We seem to be determined to rely on "tried and tested" players even though the results of tried and tested is failure. Genuine backing for an up and coming manager could reap rewards, even if it meant staying up by the skin of our teeth this season.

David Mawson