Ex-Sunderland defender says he would have ended his career on Wearside if he could have

Jody Craddock was kind enough to join us on the latest edition of the Roker Rapport podcast, as he talked to our own Chris Wynn about his career.

While there is an obvious special emphasis on his Sunderland spell, Craddock also discusses his time at Cambridge United and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

During the podcast, the former Sunderland defender talked about how his move to Sunderland came about, the various partners he had in central defence, Howard Wilkinson’s disastrous appointment as manager, and how he needed to learn Scottish to understand Alex Rae.

Craddock also revealed that he would have been happy to spend his entire career at the Stadium of Light but knew his time at the club was up:

I absolutely adored being at Sunderland, absolutely loved the fans, everything about it was fantastic.

As a footballer, I wanted to stay in the Premiership but that didn’t mean that I was looking to get away from the club.

I was a Sunderland player, teams came in for me and kind of said ‘we want you’, that’s how football works.

I wasn’t going out looking for a new club, they came knocking on the door and the club ended up getting rid of a couple of players and I was one of those players.

I didn’t have a lot of say in it, I did want to go and I did want to stay in the Premiership, what player wouldn’t want to stay in the Premiership? It’s the best division in the world.

So yeah, it was my time and I left the club but I loved the club and I would have happily stayed there for the rest of my career but that’s just how football goes sometimes.

You can listen to the entire podcast with Jody Craddock in full by clicking the relevant link and subscribing to your streaming service of choice, whether it be iTunes, Acast, Spotify or YouTube.