On This Day (2016): Sunderland supremo Davey Moyes spunks £2m on Portuguese goalkeeper Mika

I’m sure someone reading this will correct me if I am wrong, but one of my main memories of that 2016 summer deadline day was watching our pathetic attempt at finding a goalie, where we quite literally enquired about every single keeper in Europe in the hope that one of them would twig, and bear fruit.

There’s not a chance that David Moyes had even heard of Mika, but the club was in a right state by that point and the carelessness of our spending on pointless shit like, oh I dunno, third choice goalkeepers was so common that nobody really bat an eyelid.

Still, we rushed the deal through for Mr Domingues from Boavista on deadline day, and because of an issue with FIFA’s Transfer Management System (TMS) on the Portuguese side of the deal, the completion hung in the balance as we awaited approval from football’s governing body following the club’s appeal.

That appeal was eventually successful, and six days later things were confirmed - Mika was a Sunderland player, and would come into the squad on the back of Vito Mannone’s shoulder surgery, meaning the former Benfica man would act as second choice to Jordan Pickford.

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• Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images
• Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images
• Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images
• Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images
• Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images
• Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images
• Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images

He posed for some lovely photos for the club website, but sadly that’s about all he did in a Sunderland shirt.

Jordan Pickford emerged as one of the top goalkeeping talents in the country that season and was ably assisted by Vito Mannone, so this left very few opportunities for Mika to show his worth.

Still, he hung around the following season, but found himself behind Jason Steele and Robbin Ruiter, which doesn’t exactly reflect well - and then come January, the club agreed to terminate his deal so that he could head back home to Portugal.

20 appearances on the bench as an unused sub was all that we got for our two million squiddly-diddlies, and the club eventually replaced him in the squad with Lee Camp.

Good god almighty.

Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images

He eventually joined up in March with the club where he started his career, União de Leiria, leaving all of those memories of a frustrating spell on Wearside behind.

It’s probably important to state that I have no issue with Mika, and actually feel a bit sorry for him - he came here full of hopes and aspirations, but joined Sunderland at arguably the worst point in our history, with the club ran by a bunch of idiots with no real regard for the perilous state that it found itself in.

He was, unfortunately, one of many poor pieces of transfer business conducted over a two or three year period that left us dealing with the fallout for many years to come - arguably, we have only just started to mount a serious recovery.