After the horrendous Howard Wilkinson-inspired relegation of 2003, we could have done with a Terminator to get rid of a few unwanted wages.
As it was, we had some of our players demanding to be let go, or threatening us they’d return to the club!
The whole thing was a mess at this point.
Because of the money wasted by Peter Reid, particularly in his latter days, we had a load of players who were on decent wages and, having dropped into the championship on 19 points, we were desperate to get rid of.
There were others we would ideally like to keep, but were coveted by others.
And then there were others that no one seemed to want!
We were £26m in debt, and having had the seventh highest wage bill in the Premier League the season before, there was some serious cost cutting to be done.
Phil Babb, Emerson Thome, Joachim Bjorklund, and Thomas Mhyre were four players who were offered free transfers by the club – Babb and Mhyre, of course, both stayed and did pretty well for us the following season.
Kevin Phillips, Gavin McCann and Thomas Sorensen were among the names sharply linked with moves away, as was Claudio Reyna. Our 29-year-old US international midfielder had been injured for most of the previous season, and having been signed for £4.5m from Rangers two and a half years earlier was being linked with a cut price £1.5m move to Blackburn, whose manager Graeme Souness – himself with Rangers connections – liked the cut of Claudio’s jib.
That wasn’t a surprise at all. Reyna – who’d declared himself happy to stay at the club despite relegation – was a class act on his day, and had been a rare shining light in Reid’s later transfer activity, standing head and shoulders above the likes of Flo, Stewart, Wright, Piper, Medina and Laslandes.
And Big Lil was another name making headlines on this day 23 years ago – because the Frenchman wasn’t threatening to go awol from the club if he didn’t get a move… he was threatening to come back!
Laslandes was a curious one. Reidy had been well aware of the need to replace Niall Quinn eventually and had tried to land a number of targets to step into his size 12s, including Zlatan Ibrahimovic (there was a reason he was on the list at some point), and – infamously – Jan Koller.
After a brief flirtation with Patrick Mbomba, it was Lilian Laslandes – a French international at the time Thierry Henry was upfront for Les Bleus – who arrived on Wearside.
The £3.6m signing from Bordeaux arrived to much fanfare, however it was clear almost immediately to almost everyone that he wasn’t the answer. Whatever he had, it wasn’t it.
He made five starts, was subbed four times, and made another eight appearances from the bench. He got the one goal, from the bench against Sheffield Wednesday in the league cup, before Reidy gave him the chop.
?!?
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To be fair to Reidy, he never laboured on a mistake for long, and by the January, Laslandes was gone – spending the rest of the season on loan at Cologne, before playing out the 02-03 campaign at Bastia.
Of course, by the time that season concluded, Reidy was gone too – as was our Premiership status.
The gaffer’s departure hadn’t changed the club’s feelings towards Lil – but he had a year left on his contract, and at this point Sunderland were keen to get some cash back for him, rather than losing him for free in a year’s time.
But Laslandes was pushing for a free transfer, and was quoted in the Echo – presumably translated from French – stressing his desire to be ‘liberated!’
I don’t think Sunderland will make problems for me leaving, despite having changed management recently.
The interest of the club is to facilitate my departure since next year I will be free. I hope that an agreement can be reached for me to be liberated as early as this summer.
But for the moment the club do not want to budge.
I think, therefore I will have to resume in England in July before being able to leave Sunderland.
As it was, Sunderland were in no position to play hardball, with Laslandes on a good wicket financially – and they ended up agreeing to Laslandes’ request for a free transfer. He joined Nice before returning to Bordeaux and then had another spell at Nice before retiring from football to become a handball player.
As for Sunderland, Mick McCarthy was facing a summer of turmoil – overseeing a fire sale, getting rid of big wages that no one else wanted to pick up, and assembling some sort of squad ready to take on the Championship.
