This farce will be the end of us - Sunderland are in despair

What more is there to say? What is left that hasn't already been said about this club, about it's owner and the people that fail it time and time again?

Simon Grayson stated not two days ago that we didn't need a striker. You know what we don't need? Another yes man to iron Martin Bain's resume before he follows Ellis Short out the door, once the pair of them have finished gutting this club like a fish.

We were told we HAD to sell Jordan Pickford. We were told we HAD to go down to become stronger. We were told we HAD to believe in Bain's “new plan”, the “plan” that would remedy years of struggle and mismanagement, a concrete “plan” that Bain had brought to us, in his infinite wisdom.

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There is a disease at the core of this club and it needs to be excised with a root and branch review. It's gone beyond the point of a joke – this comedy has become a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. We are crumbling like a cliff in the face of heavy tides and before we truly appreciate what is being done to us, we will be washed away and cast off into a sea of uncertainty and hostile atmosphere, where we can kiss goodbye to attracting young talent, we can kiss goodbye to healthy competition and we'll thank our lucky stars we've unaccountably still got a player of Jack Rodwell's comparative high calibre.

I'm sick of hearing about how Martin Bain “has a job to do”. Bailiffs have a job to do, but they're still a bunch of heartless f***s. Banks have a job to do when you default on your mortgage. The pilots that dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had jobs to do. Well done you, you bunch of c**ts.

Being good at being bad is not the same as being good. Congratulations, your pay packet is massive while the people that give you a reason to be employed in the first place have to struggle to replace the money they wasted watching the display you provided. Cleaners can get the sack - because apparently we don't need clean toilets in the Championship - but hey, Martin Bain has a job to do. What a guy.

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When Simon Grayson was first asked about the amount of money he would have to reinforce, or rather rebuild, our squad, his response was that he would have a reasonable budget; “a mid-level Championship budget.” That budget was widely regarded as being between £10m-20m and if you take a look at the teams occupying the mid-table of the league right now, a league which has seen over £200m change hands, that's accurate; Sheffield Wednesday spent around £14m, Reading also, Fulham, £18m, and so on and so forth.

So when he came out and said that we didn't need a striker – blind to an issue so glaring as to be as blinding as staring at a solar eclipse – there was a fair bit of conversation about it. Some people jump to his defence, out of a commendable sense of loyalty to the new manager, stating that he was telling the truth and didn't want to cause an unnecessary fuss that might distract from the job at hand.

Well, having watched the 'job at hand', I can confirm that reiterating what is now common knowledge - that the man he answers to, Bain, is a lying, penny-pinching spin doctor - should have been the least of his worries. You couldn't distract this team any more if you tried, they looked like they were anywhere else but on the pitch. They look leaderless and lost, without courage, without confidence and utterly devoid of heart. I actually pity a few of them now, as much as I can with the taste of another capitulation still fresh and acrid in my mouth.

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So here's the issue: if Simon Grayson truly believes the words that have been coming out of his mouth lately, and if he truly believes what he's fielding on the pitch is truly in contention for anything other than relegation, Simon Grayson is one of two things: he's either very, very naïve, or he's deliberately avoiding clashing heads with the only people that could have made his job easier. He stated clearly that he'd have a mid-level Championship budget, then spent less than £2m in the transfer window, about 20% of that budget.

It makes you question whether or not there ever was a serious chance of Short entertaining those potential investors back when we were in need of a new manager. It's just as likely that it was nothing but a smoke screen to distract from the fact that Derek McInnes wouldn't accept the nonexistent assurances from Bain, either because the money was never going to be mid-level, or he's simply a bit too long in the tooth to be fooled by a glorified accountant. Of course, it would have been devastating for the club's public image if a manager wouldn't come South for this club from the Scottish leagues because the money doesn't even compare to North of the border. As terrible for their public image as hiring a man, twice fired from this league, with not so much as a promise of funds from player sales to go on.

We are being systematically stripped down by this regime and we will currently not recover. There is no heart in this club anymore, these people do not know you or relate to you or understand you. Their efforts are meagre, their intentions are false and we cannot expect any of these problems to go away until someone that cares for what Sunderland AFC used to stand for manages to wrestle control of the club from the current owner, and comes in swinging the axe. There are no more unaccountable left at that club, they were all thrown away when the richest among them finally let them down, just like they'd be promising to do for half a decade.

We’ll be speculating about this right down to the moment we can turn around and realise we’re in League One with no money, no owner of any great resource and no talented players, in either the first team or the development squad.

At this rate by 2019 we’ll be lucky if we can pay a team to play for us. Time to wake up.