Sunderland have received fresh interest from Championship new boys in Jack Clarke.
The Black Cats have so far managed to ward off major interest in their star man, but it has now been reported that Ipswich Town are showing ‘genuine’ interest in the winger.
Sunderland want at least £25 million for Clarke and certainly won’t roll over easily, but it appears they could be in for a long summer.
Clarke’s exit will be a concern for the club and the fans because of his importance over the last couple of seasons.
The 23-year-old netted 15 of Sunderland’s 52 goals in the Championship last term and proved to be their only real attacking threat.
Despite potentially raking in £25m for his signature, the Wearside outfit will face a huge challenge to try and replace him.
Sunderland pair could replace Clarke
Journalist Michael Graham has claimed Sunderland could actually look to two of their current players to ‘step up’ in the ‘short-term’.
Writing on X, he said: “They have plenty of targets but it’s hard to plan for because you can’t control what other clubs do. You’ll struggle get a one-to-one replacement too. A replacement would probably need time. Ideally, in the short-term, #SAFC would like [Romaine] Mundle or [Nazariy] Rusyn to step up I suspect.”
Romaine Mundle is not good enough for Sunderland
Mundle’s arrival was initially believed to be a pre-planned replacement for Clarke, but the early signs are certainly not promising.
The 21-year-old appeared to be forgotten about pretty quickly after joining from Standard Liege, featuring for only nine minutes in the last six games of the season.
Mundle is far from an ideal Clarke replacement, while the best is yet to come from Rusyn, who was deployed as a striker last term.
Those two can’t be expected to take Clarke’s place for too long though, and the longer they are filling his void, the less likely Sunderland are to score goals and pick up points.
It definitely won’t be easy to replace Clarke, but with £25m in our pockets, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus has to do everything to find someone who can push the club up towards the play-offs again.
KLD and Kristjaan Speakman have done everything right so far this summer and they can’t be about to make their first mistake with their handling of the attacker’s situation.