Premier League relegation: Di Canio could be a disaster

 

Sunderland's decision to sack Martin O'Neill and bring in Paolo Di Canio is a high risk gamble in the fight for Premier League survival that might backfire. Ralph  Ellis explains why...

 

My dad was a building site manager. In the summer when I left school I worked for him as a labourer to make a few quid before going to college.

 

Dad was a mild mannered, gentle soul at home. When we kids had done something wrong he would sort it out with a sensible word and make you think about what you should  do better. So it came as something as a shock when one day that summer our concrete gang got called into his office to discuss how we were way behind schedule - and  why four of them had skipped work the day before to go on a drinking spree.

 

He delivered a brutal ten minute rollicking, complete with language I'd never heard him use, and warned all six of us that if we didn't buck our ideas up we'd have no  job by the end of the week. We ended the summer way ahead of target, and all earned so much bonus that it was ten years in journalism before I made as much money  again.

 

Once he'd retired Dad used to talk football to me and wonder why so many managers didn't seem to be able to get maximum effort from their players. I'd remind him of  that day, and of his threats, and ask him: "How would you have dealt with it if they were all multi-millionaires?"

 

Sorry for the long story, but that in a nutshell is what is facing Paolo Di Canio when he starts work as manager of Sunderland today. The Italian has been hugely  successful as a manager at Swindon for one simple reason - he has ruled by fear and tyranny.

 

A County Ground player I spoke to yesterday described the regime as "a proper dictatorship". They went three months this season without a day off, they did regular  double sessions of running and pumping weights. They got fined if they were outside their homes after 1pm on a Thursday. They got fined if they were found out to have  butter on their toast.

 

At Swindon it worked. While some players fell by the wayside, others loved the hard regime that made them better and earned them bonuses. If any of them fell out with  the boss then it hardly mattered because at League Two and League One level it isn't hard to find another player just as good or even better. He won promotion and left  behind a squad strong enough that they were heading to leaders Doncaster today still with a chance of going up again automatically, and 2.66 to win promotion by any means.

 

At Sunderland it might be different. Try hauling off Simon Mignolet after 20 minutes and telling him he is the "worst player he's seen on a football pitch", as Di  Canio did with Swindon goalkeeper Wes Foderingham, and see what happens. Try telling the Sunderland fans, if they don't like a performance, to go and support Newcastle  instead - the equivalent of what he did when he suggested some unhappy Swindon supporters should go to Oxford. Try bullying enigmatic former England winger Adam  Johnson and see him retreat to give even less confident performances.

Sunderland are 2.92 to get relegatedand with a fixture list from hell ahead of them, serious injuries that have robbed the squad of Steven Fletcher and Lee Cattermole for the rest of the campaign, and now a manager who will split opinion among the players he has got, that suddenly looks a very good price. The only people rubbing their hands with delight today about Di Canio's arrival are the other clubs who are fighting for survival.

 

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