Roker Roundup: Scotland to pursue managerial targets - with Sunderland’s Jack Ross on shortlist

Scotland to start management pursuit

As we mentioned in yesterday’s roundup, the Scottish FA held a board meeting on Monday where they put together a shortlist of the vacant role of national team manager, a shortlist that includes Sunderland boss Jack Ross.

Now, according to the Daily Record, chief executive Ian Maxwell has been given the green light to pursue the SFA’s chosen targets.

The report claims that the board meeting happened after Maxwell had worked out how much it would cost to recruit those potential candidates for a job that has also received interest from ‘dozens of managers from around the world’.

Successful trial for target

Sunderland missed out on Hastings United midfield Adam Lovett on transfer deadline day in January when the move fell through at the last minute.

The midfielder spent last week on trial with Premier League side Leicester City and Hastings’ manager Chris Agutter said the experience went very well for the Sunderland target and expects him to move up the football ladder next season:

Very good. Brendan Rogers I believe, Kolo Toure and all the rest of it were there, and they thought they were part of the academy set-up already; they didn’t realise they were triallists. They did really well.

be more excited for them, but I’m just conscious I don’t want any distractions from what we’re doing at Hastings.

Either way I think both lads will go on make significant step ups in levels next season, which is superb to be fair. It’s great for them and great for the club because it shows the vision we’ve got in terms of developing our own players, and bring through young players, works.

I’m just pleased because when Johno [Simon Johnson] left last year, his replacement was Adam Lovatt. When Ollie Rowe left last year, his replacement was Jamie Fielding.

It’s nice young, local players are coming through and stepping up, and I’m pretty sure moving on to bigger things.

To be fair Adam especially is incredibly disciplined and professional, and they’re here to do a job for Hastings.

Sunderland draw the catalyst for Luton

While Barnsley, Portsmouth and Sunderland have been fighting it out for second place for the past few months, Luton Town have been ahead of the pack and look certain to clinch promotion to the Championship in the near future.

That is despite Nathan Jones quitting as manager back in January to take over Stoke City, something that left the Luton squad ‘gutted’ but according to League One player of the year James Collins, it was the draw at Sunderland shortly after Jones’ departure that was the catalyst that spurred the Hatters on:

It did come out of the blue, we played Sheffield Wednesday in the FA Cup and we had a few days off because we didn’t have a game until the following week. When we came back in, he had spoken to Stoke. The majority of the lads were gutted, myself included.

After that game at Sunderland, where we got a draw up there and 7,000 fans followed us up, that was the moment we knew we could keep going.

We knew we could really achieve something, even with Nathan gone.

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