It’s the morning after the day before, and for the first time since Sunderland AFC were founded and introduced to the Football League, fans were waking up as fans of a club in the third tier of English football.
After relegation from Division One in 1985, Lawrie McMenemy surprised the football world by leaving his cushy number at Southampton to attempt to return Sunderland to get out of the second division – two years later, we left via the wrong exit.
At the end of McMenemy’s first season, he ended
up waving a white handkerchief at the Roker faithful because it was so bad. Because he was handed one of the biggest contracts in English football while having pretty much full control at the club, he was allowed to continue his dismantling of a once-proud institution for another season.
Things came to a head after a 2-1 home defeat to Sheffield United, which left Sunderland two points and three places above the bottom three with seven games left to play. As Clive Hetherington wrote in the Shields Gazette, emotions were running high following the defeat at Roker:
Sunderland fans voted with their feet on two fronts – and the figures were frightening for strife-ridden Roker Park. The “stay-aways” and the “die-hards” have, quite simply, had enough. The lowest League crowd for 13 years – 8,544 – witnessed another pathetic performance from Lawrie McMenemy’s side as they slumped to their fifth defeat in six matches.
A mass demonstration outside the Main Stand followed, and as a result, the cars of the manager and the chairman, Bob Murray, were damaged. The next day, Murray was reported in the Echo to have “pledged his intentions to carry on and continue to back managing director Lawrie McMenemy until the end of the season”.
Before the next fixture at Bradford City came around seven days later, McMenemy ran off in the middle of the night, and Murray had quickly appointed 1973 cup-winning manager Bob Stoke at the helm to save the club from disaster.
Twenty-one points were on offer in those last eight games, and the eight picked up weren’t good enough to keep Sunderland out of the bottom three, but did provide an opportunity in the play-offs against Gillingham, which were also lost. It wasn’t through lack of trying, however, as Stokoe risked his own health as he tried every option available to him, whether right or wrong, as described by Geoff Storey in the Echo:
Brought in at the 11th hour to stave off relegation to the Third Division for the first time in the club’s 108-year history, 56-year-old Stokoe lost seven punds in weight in less than four weeks during the unsuccessful survival bid.
Stokoe defended his decision to switch Dave Swindlehurst to central defence in preference to David Corner, a decision I find staggering. Swindlehurst has not had the best of seasons in attack and to risk him is such an important position proved a disaster.
Stokoe had been clear all along that he did not want the job long-term, but he was still hopeful of some involvement at the club moving forward. This ended on this day in 1987 as Murray confirmed he was starting from scratch, and Stokoe left the club for a second and final time.
This meant the rumour mill could well and truly get rolling, and the early favourite appeared to be Mel Machin, who had recently left his post at Norwich City and was apparently delaying a decision on whether or not to accept the top job at Manchester City to see if an offer arrived from Sunderland.
Next on the list appeared to be Trevor Cherry, who had left Bradford City earlier in the season and was approached by Murray to follow McMenemy, but Cherry wanted a longer-term deal than the end of the season, and his assistant Terry Yorath also came into the category, as both were reported to have been approached for the job.
Colin Todd was next on the list according to the bookies, as the former Sunderland defender was highly-rated as Bruce Rioch’s number two at Middlesbrough. Also on the rumoured shortlist were Northampton’s Newcastle-born boss Graham Carr, Swindon Town’s Lou Macari and Ian Porterfield was also linked.
One name that was keen to throw his hat into the ring was former Sunderland boss Alan Durban, who was managing a tennis centre in Telford at the time. Outside bets that were also reported were Ron Atkinson, Malcolm MacDonald and of course Brian Clough. But with all those managers linked, Murray got it right in the end.
