Sunderland’s revolting players and Di Canio’s sacking – What’s the real picture?

Di Canio seems to thrive on chaos so much that he seems to create most of it, yet others are different. Did he have the capacity to understand that? There’s no doubt he is driven, there’s little doubt he wanted the best for Sunderland as he was desperate to manage in the Premier League, but in the end it seems he’s just too late as his style of management would’ve been more suited to 70’s, 80’s or even 90’s.

There have been many managers down the years who have ruled by fear.

Brian Clough is the classic example, and ended up surrounding himself with players who would do anything he asked or told them to. Did they all like him? Doubt it very much. There’s a story of the night before their European Cup Final in 1979 and Clough has them all up drinking the night before. Clough was a big believer in drink settling the nerves. Archie Gemmill wanted to go to bed early and Clough, in front of everyone, embarrassed his star midfielder into staying by insisting they all do things together.

One thing Clough was very good at was building a team spirit. Other managers have been able to do that more than anything, and Di Canio’s predecessor Martin O’Neill was certainly one. It has been suggested Di Canio kept putting O’Neill down which lead to some of the players becoming unhappy with his methods. He may have done better to have learned a thing or two from the Irishman.

Martin O’Neill who was replaced by Di Canio as Sunderland manager

But that last point is one of several which make me very uncomfortable about this whole business. If the players thought that much of O’Neill and would ‘walk through walls for him’ why didn’t they? It was their performance which got him the sack, had they been prepared to die for the cause then maybe he’d be in employment. You occasionally hear a player admit it is up to them to get results, but nowadays it’s the players who call the tune, along with their agent who has the club by the short and curlies. As far as I can see Di Canio was trying to do two things. Raise the profile of the First Team as something to aspire to and be proud to be in, and secondly push his players to become the best they could possibly be. Yeah sure, he may have different methods to other managers but so has Jose Mourinho, so has Marcelo Bielsa.

Di Canio was so determined to build up the profile of the first team he decreed no academy player could use the gym if one of the first team players was in there. If they had to wait till late afternoon, then so be it. He clearly wanted to make the first team the Holy Grail and something you should sacrifice everything to get into and once there, you’d do anything to stay. But these are laudable aims and maybe his delivery needed some work, yet he wasn’t given that time. Where clubs spend nearly all their turnover on wages and will even pay a player’s agent when all he does is negotiate a contract extension, then you realise they’re pretty indispensable. Brown and O’Shea were considered surplus to requirements at Old Trafford and must’ve experienced to wrath of Alex Ferguson, yet did they go whingeing to the Chairman to demand his removal?

Sam Wallace of The Independent claimed

“He (Di Canio) tried to build the kind of austere, highly regimented football set-up that would be familiar to Italian players of his generation and is completely alien to the modern Premier League footballer”.