Alex Neil has explained what he believed was ‘perfect’ about the Sunderland team that he inherited.
Alex Neil arrived in Sunderland to a rather disappointed reception in February 2022, with the club sat fourth in the League One table.
Bar a 2-1 defeat to MK Dons, the Scot then went unbeaten for the remainder of the campaign, winning eight of their remaining 15 games and going onto win the play-off final.
Given the amount of dead wood they had brought in under Stewart Donald, Kristjaan Speakman had gone onto work wonders with the arrivals of players such as Trai Hume, Alex Pritchard, Nathan Broadhead and Jack Clarke.
Sunderland had added experience to their ranks and had signed four players over the age of 27 years old, as well as the crop of youngsters that have since shone in the Championship.
Neil then went onto win promotion with these same group of players, and the 42-year-old has admitted that the balance in his squad was ‘perfect’.
Speaking on the #EFLDebate YouTube channel, Neil said: “For youth players to progress and to flourish, you need good experienced around them. That was probably quite a healthy discussion point quite regularly.
“I think if you look at them just now, my view is they’re probably light on experience. They’re very young, but extremely talented young players. I do believe that you need a couple of dots of experience. I thought the balance of the team that I picked up when I went to Sunderland was perfect. We had Dennis Cirkin, we had Dan Neil, we had Jack Clarke – we had so many young players. So you certainly wouldn’t accuse that team of not having a lot of young players in it. But equally… Luke O’Nien, Corry Evans, Alex Pritchard, Ross Stewart, they were equally as important.
“The balance for the team was perfect, the attitude of the team in terms of appetite to win and the quality we had, it just all aligned itself with each other and we deserved to go up.”
Where have Sunderland gone wrong?
The team that beat Wycombe Wanderers in the play-off final included Lynden Gooch, Bailey Wright, Danny Batth, Corry Evans and Alex Pritchard. In fact, the only youngsters they had in the whole line-up were Anthony Patterson and Dennis Cirkin.
Since then, the Black Cats have offloaded five of the starting line-up, while four of them are injured. Only Patterson started their defeat to Southampton at the weekend.
Kristjaan Speakman has slowly reduced the Sunderland squad to a bunch of young boys having a kick-about, which was a lot of fun to watch last season, but their lack of experience and leadership has become blatantly obvious when they don’t have a few veterans to look up to.
Everyone knew it was a big mistake selling Batth, and I would do anything to have him back in this team now. Especially given that someone thought it would be a smart move to only have three centre-backs in the whole squad for the second half of the campaign.
Alex Neil won us a promotion with a mixture of young and experienced players, so why did we think we could handle the Championship with only one half of that?