Simon Grayson has had his say on his time at Sunderland seven years on.
Simon Grayson had recently won promotion to the Championship with Preston North End before he joined Sunderland, who had just been relegated.
The 54-year-old went unbeaten in his opening three games, but then went onto claim only five points from a possible 30 before he was sacked with the club 22nd in the league table.
Grayson didn’t enjoy much success after leaving Wearside but most recently finished as runner-up in both the Indian Super League and the Indian Super Cup last season, before leaving Bengaluru in December.
Sunderland went onto replace him with Chris Coleman, who took the club down to League One before he was dismissed.
Despite Grayson claiming the second-lowest win percentage out of any manager at the Stadium of Light (16.7%), he has insisted that it wasn’t his ‘fault’.
Grayson said (via Lancashire Evening Post): “I don’t think it was as far as we could’ve taken them (Preston), because we had an immense group who were talented – but would run through brick walls for you as well.
“But, when Sunderland came knocking it was just too good of an opportunity.
“And I was going with the motto that you can only have regrets about things you don’t do. If I was going to not go to Sunderland and somebody took them back up, I would’ve been regretting that. It was a huge football club and I probably didn’t realise, at the time, that it was in as bad a state as it was – in terms of the toxic side within the dressing room. The stadium wasn’t a great place for players to play; the money had obviously been cut hugely from Ellis Short.
“But, he put something like £300m in and we’d sold players for something like £40/50m, and brought 12 new ones in for £1m – which doesn’t really happen, if you are wanting a tilt at getting back to the Premier League in your first season.
“So, there were a lot of things I didn’t really understand – or know how difficult they’d be at that time. Obviously, I didn’t stay there too long but Chris Coleman went in and found it just as difficult as me. So, it is not always the coaches’ fault. There are other things, behind the scenes, that are maybe having an impact on results.”
Was Simon Grayson that bad?
Simon Grayson is correct about there being much bigger issues going on behind the scenes and that is why we suffered back-to-back relegations.
There is no denying that Ellis Short was out of his depth when no matter who the manager was or which players we had, we only ever seemed to get worse.
However, that doesn’t mean Simon Grayson was a good manager. He still did an atrocious job and would have also got us relegated if he had stuck around for the campaign.
The likes of Sam Allardyce and Gus Poyet were around during the dark days (granted, not as dark as in the Championship), but still managed to do a decent job considering.
But every coach who has failed at Sunderland as much as Grayson will use that as an excuse for their struggles.
He did bring Aiden McGeady to the club though, so it wasn’t all bad. Though the likes of Brendan Galloway, Jason Steele and James Vaughan followed..