Podcast Notes: False dawns have been the story of Chris Coleman’s time at sorry Sunderland

Let me just firstly say that I believe that Chris Coleman is the man to drive Sunderland back to the Championship next season. I believe in him and, like many other supporters, I find him to be incredibly likeable.

But here we are again. We hammer Derby 4-1 on their own patch on Friday night and succumb to a 3-1 defeat at home to a p*ss-poor Sheffield Wednesday side just three days later - it’s a familiar pattern we’ve seen form throughout this season where we just aren’t able to put together back-to-back victories.

Sunderland’s inability to build on good results has been a key issue throughout the entirety of this campaign - we’ve not put together back-back wins since November 2016. We followed our early season win over Norwich with a win-less 16 game run, then defeated Burton in November but followed that particular achievement up with a 3-1 home defeat to a fellow struggler in Reading. A 1-0 victory over Fulham was then followed up with a 1-1 draw with Birmingham and a 3-0 humbling at the hands of Sheffield United.

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We ended 2017 with an impressive away victory at Nottingham Forest and then lost 1-0 at home to Barnsley. A 1-0 home victory over Hull saw us roll into Birmingham with a huge opportunity, and we fluffed our lines again losing 3-1. And now we undo all our good work on Friday with another awful home loss.

Monday was the most difficult defeat to stomach this season for a few reasons. Firstly it it a huge nail to our Championship coffin. Secondly it showed how some minor investment in key areas - i.e. a decent ‘keeper and some defenders that can actually cope in a physical battle - could have between being mid-table and being a team that looks set to be relegated. And the final painful reason was the fact that the manager had bigged up the game to such a level that I felt as a fan the team were going to be performing out of their skins.

Not one player in Sunderland’s team gave a man of the match performance. How can we expect to win games of football if we’re completely lacking in end product and quality? And before you say we don’t have any - we do, I saw it on Friday.

Aiden McGeady was all fart and no sh*te - he showed signs of promise but ultimately failed to deliver more than a couple of good corners. Ashley Fletcher lost his battle against the Sheffield Wednesday defence and really offered nothing beyond a few nice touches. Marc Wilson was quite clearly not ready to play and looked shaky from the first minute.

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And really the rest of them were just okay. Apart from Camp - his performance was offensive to the goalkeeping profession.

I also found it curious that Chris Coleman brought on Ejaria and Asoro so late in the game - we needed their energy on 60 minutes, not 80.

But hey-ho - Monday’s result is not the sole reason we are going down. We are going down because the players, management and owners are simply not good enough.