Kristjaan Speakman has offered his verdict on the future of Sunderland’s struggling strikers.
Sunderland had been without Ross Stewart since he picked up a serious injury in January 2023, while Joe Gelhardt’s loan spell came to an end in the summer.
As a result, the Black Cats went onto bring in Luis Hemir Semedo, Nazariy Rusyn, Eliezer Mayenda and Mason Burstow.
Nazariy Rusyn was the only one of the four who had already earned regular experience in senior football, and that became very clear when the strikers went onto really struggle to adapt to the Championship.
The Ukrainian was the first to score in Sunderland’s 2-0 win over Preston earlier this month, before Burstow netted the opener in the weekend’s victory over Stoke City.
They are still far from the standard expected of a side chasing promotion though, while their futures look even more doubtful as Sunderland continue to look for a proven goalscorer before tomorrow’s deadline.
The Black Cats could potentially have five forwards if they can land target Kieffer Moore, however Kristjaan Speakman has still tipped the youngsters to come good with time.
Speaking to the Sunderland Echo, he said: “We’ve got a lot of belief in the players in the group,” Speakman said.
“We’ve just got to get clarity and maybe we haven’t been good enough in giving clarity around what our expectation of the players is. We signed a player around a year or so ago for example, and a lot of the feedback when we went to fan forums was that he hadn’t done well enough. Well internally, we thought he’d already done more than we expected initially.
“We’ve got to understand where they are in the career, where they are now and where we’re trying to get them to,” he added.
“I understand now that we live in a world where we all want things instantly – that’s obviously the ideal if players turn up, integrate and perform immediately. Amad came and I don’t think anyone would say he was in the team from day one and everyone said ‘this kid is going to be a superstar for Sunderland’, it took him a little bit of time for him to adapt. Ross Stewart, I think it’s fair to say that it was probably around six months into his journey here [he began to play regularly]. Players aren’t robots, you cannot take a human, move them and expect them to perform exactly the same, straight away, in a different environment.
“It’s on us to try to create that environment for them and then it’s up to them to step up. I’ve got faith in the boys to keep getting better, yeah. What level they can eventually get to will be decided by all those factors; if I had the magic answer to that…. then it’s the Coca Cola secret, isn’t it? We try to do the best we can with the information we’ve got, to make the best judgements and selections.”
Is it too little too late?
Kristjaan Speakman is right in saying that nobody will have expected Ross Stewart and Amad Diallo to succeed the way they did, but I don’t think anyone is actually questioning whether these four strikers will be good in the future.
We clearly bough them with the future in mind, but Sunderland fans’ problem is that we need a goalscorer right now.
The four summer arrivals could prove to be great signings in a few years time, but that doesn’t help us in the present. We don’t want to wait years to get promoted, and so this pursuit of Kieffer Moore may have come too late.