December 2019 was a bleak time for Sunderland, and the national media had plenty to say about us. We ended the year in the bottom half of League One, with a 0-0 draw against a very skint Bolton Wanderers, who were forced to play mainly academy players due to having insufficient senior players, being the icing on this awful cake.
We were at our lowest, having finished fifth the previous year. A new lowest position was sealed later that season when, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we finished 8th. Missing
out on the play-offs in the third tier, virus or no virus, was bleak, and no amount of spin could convince anyone otherwise.
A Guardian article published in December 2019 had a main photo of Luke O’Nien looking disappointed, lying on the floor. This was all of us that season, and when football took a back seat and the country went into lockdown, it was quite nice for a bit. That campaign may have ended up with us reaching the play-offs and then going up, but this moment around Christmas was the lowest we’d ever been.
Less than six years later, we are ninth in the Premier League, having lost just two of our opening seven games and winning three. Not many fans can say they experienced the literal lowest point in their club’s existence, but unfortunately, I was at that 0-0 draw on Boxing Day 2019, and coming away from the Stadium of Light, freezing and seeing Sunderland sitting in the bottom half of League One left me feeling despondent as to what would be next for the club.
The whole campaign was a strange one through the Covid-19 cancellation, but looking back, everything about it was awful for Sunderland. From losing at places like Lincoln City and Wycombe, to the crap home kit and then the poor players we had in that kit, everything about that season just felt crap.
The article in The Guardian is a fascinating, albeit depressing, look back at this period, with reminders of Aidan McGeady, arguably our best player, being banished to the under-23s and Chris Maguire tucking into a McDonald’s after a last-minute 1-0 defeat down at Gillingham – a game where manager Phil Parkinson infamously said that a point would have been a good result.
The ownership and hierarchy of the club had torn us to bits, and this season left us in the biggest mess of recent times. The brightest talents were sold for pennies and, contrary to what Charlie Methven said, the piss-taking party did not stop there.
You might be wondering, ‘Why are you going back through these crap moments and punishing yourself?’ and, to be honest, looking back through articles at the time, it did feel like just that – a self-inflicted punishment. But I’ve also found that by going through these times, seeing just how much of a joke we were on the national scene and analysing how we were viewed, it’s been possible to show to an even greater extent just how impressive our rise back to the Premier League has been.
It took over five years, and plenty of managers and players have passed through since, but where we are now is light-years from the state of the club written about by Louise Taylor in The Guardian back in December 2019.
Reading this utterly damning perspective of a club being run into a brick wall should be enough for everyone at the club to hope, pray, and know that we’ll never reach those depths again and that the future is as bright as it seems to be on Wearside.
