It was never supposed to be this easy.
The euphoria following Tommy Watson’s winner enjoyed a long shelf life but it was tempered ever so slightly, with a gnawing trepidation about what awaited as memories of our most recent Premier League campaigns — perennially spent fighting relegation — resurfaced.
The laws of probability offered no solace to those looking for a more rational perspective on how Sunderland might fare. Statistics abounded and became hard to ignore, painting a grim prospect of survival
for a team promoted via the playoffs.
Above all else, though, was the realisation that promotion represented an inflection point for our club; a kind of end of the beginning for ‘the project’. This brought excitement and curiosity about what the next level would look like, but also a strange sense of loss.
A squad of young, hungry players on a developmental journey — including a homegrown and home-adopted core comprised of the likes of Dan Neil, Anthony Patterson, Chris Rigg and Luke O’Nien — had won us promotion but a Premier League survival campaign was a different matter entirely, and it felt that at best, their development would be hindered or, at worst, that the identity built up over the last few seasons would become a necessary sacrifice at the altar of staving off relegation.
Now, the trajectory had changed and the stakes were much higher.
The prospect of success was tantalising but failure risked squandering the progress made since escaping League One, and above all else was the nagging suspicion that perhaps we’d progressed too far too soon — surely it would take more than three years to transition from a League One side to one capable of surviving in the cutthroat world of the Premier League?
Yet here we are. Sitting pretty in mid-table with forty three EPL-accrued points — six of them at the expense of our suddenly not quite so noisy neighbours — with seven games remaining. How we got here has been well documented, from Granit Xhaka’s leadership to astute transfer business across the team, but less discussed is what we can expect, and hope for, from our remaining matches and for next season.
Will we push for a coveted European spot? With a relatively benign run-in and key players such as Robin Roefs and Nordi Mukiele returning from injury, it’s not nearly as fanciful a notion as it sounds.
Such lofty ambitions can rekindle the same pre-season concerns that perhaps Sunderland are over-stretching themselves.
Spurs and Nottingham Forest have both struggled in the league this season whilst fighting simultaneously on the European front. We have a squad that’s proven itself capable of adapting to, and even thriving under the rigorous demands of a Premier League season. Assembling a more robust squad to cope with a concurrent European campaign can feel like too big a step up.
It certainly feels that way, but so did the possibility of building a squad capable of surviving in the Premier League.
Revisionist thinking has a habit of downplaying difficulties after they’ve been overcome, as if there was always an element of inevitability that had previously been overlooked. With this exercise in reading history backwards, the next challenge will always seem insurmountable compared to previous, successfully-overcome ones.
Fortunately those calling the shots at Sunderland these days seem immune to this way of thinking, as it’s unusual for a club’s hierarchy to set ambitions above and beyond those of the fans.
That’s not to say that fans temper their expectations. Far from it. But ambition and expectation are very different and years of frustrated expectation can make us sceptical about ambitions that go beyond our wildest expectation. We know Sunderland and we think we know how the story ends, but I’m no longer so sure. This is still Sunderland, but not as we know it.
Fears of ‘second season syndrome’ will lurk throughout the summer, but the lesson of the last few years is that Sunderland’s past offers little guidance as to how the future will look.
So whilst whittling about potential relegation, I’ll take comfort in the fact that such petty concerns won’t be occupying the minds of players and staff alike, who seem determined not to set a fixed limit on the march of Sunderland AFC.
