It will soon be a year since Sunderland overcame all odds to create one of my favorite days of club support.
Nobody at Deepdale anticipated anything less than another riveting performance against Preston, but we also held out hope that, come 2022/2023’s last day, we would manage to slip into the Championship’s top six.Even though the odds were stacked against us, what was about to happen was pure fantasy as the rain began to pour after the half.
At the end of our first season back in the second division, three incredible goals and a remarkable Millwall comeback against Blackburn guaranteed us a spot in the playoffs.
More than anything, the club’s moment came when the full-time whistle blew, and nearly 6,000 of us celebrated—mostly in disbelief.
Even though Luton ultimately stole the thunder of a Wembley playoff victory, we were ultimately defeated by a close margin, but the season seemed like the beginning of something special at the club.
Nobody realized at the time, but the Luton celebrations’ passageways proved to be the primary turning point for the 2023–2024 season.
When Italian reporter Fabrizio Romano revealed less than a month prior that the team “appreciates Francesco Farioli as new head coach for next season,” Tony Mowbray contemplated whether his time at Sunderland felt like it was about to end.
Before news outlets confirmed that Mowbray was staying, there was a great deal of conjecture on social media about his future.
From then on, as the club persisted in using their recruitment methodology, there was always a sense of ambiguity over Mowbray’s duration and his potential impact.
Ultimately, he was only in office for four months of the new campaign when a decision was reached to divide it in half. It’s undeniable that the “succession plan” hurt the season, even though the fan base is still divided over the choice to remove him from his position.
The season turned south when Mowbray was fired, although it would be best to say nothing about Michael Beale’s hiring as we all know how that worked out.
The FA Cup derby fiasco, together with that decision, swiftly eliminated whatever positive vibe that had been accumulating since Kyril Louis-Dreyfus took over the team.
It’s been a frustrating few months, and this will finally lead to a busy summer, during which the fans will need to see some kind of resolution to the problems that have been bothering them for the previous year.
The fresh head coach must take over and have an immediate influence, and “the model” must change in some way for the players.
Before he departed the club, Mowbray was raising this issue, and it also limited the amount of work that Mike Dodds and Beale could perform in the second half of the season.
But the biggest turning point of this season happened about a year ago at Kenilworth Road following a game, when Mowbray’s job at Sunderland was called into question.
The 2023–2024 season saw us start the season strong, but it quickly fizzled out into a campaign that saw us end six points above the relegation zone with only two wins from our final fifteen games.
We appear to have beaten the odds to finish in the top six a lifetime ago, but the club must take action during the busy summer ahead of them if they hope to repeat that feat.