The player in question we didnt pay £6 million for? It was widely known to be Rade Prica, who scored shitloads of goals in the danish league though never started a game for Sunderland, and looked fucking hopeless whenever he came on as sub (only about twice). We paid around £1 mill up front for him + add ons, which will have cost us fuck all.
You said it. Can only imagine how much worse than Keane he will be in the transfer market. The man should never be allowed to spend over £1m on a player for the rest of his career.
Hes class in the transfer market in general, he got anelka to go to bolton for a start. Hes not my choice for manager but he'll do a mint job if he gets it, better than Joe Kinnear will ever dofor you lot
Per-Magnus Andersson, the new chairman of the company that owns Sunderland, has revealed that they were happy to see Roy Keane leave his post as the club's manager on Thursday, claiming the 37-year-old's "unstable personality" made him unsuitable for management. "In the end the demands on him became too big, the pressure became too much," Andersson said last night. "Personally I think that he has quite an unstable personality. He is not an Alex Ferguson, which many people think. He is a bit of a maverick and he didn't succeed on the pitch because of his pit-bull mentality. He had the outlook as a player that said: 'If you knock me down I will kick you and then we can see who is still standing at the end of the game,' and that is the way he was as a coach as well." Andersson is the president of the American asset management company Kitano Capital, which recently bought a significant percentage of the shares in Drumaville, which owns Sunderland. The Swede said last night they had given Keane the option of several new contracts but that the Irishman in the end decided he was not the right man for the club. "We have worked hard for four weeks in order to get him to sign an extension and have given his agent several different offers," he told the website fotbollskanalen.se. "The contract issue was not the reason he quit, they were very good offers compared to what other managers are paid in the Premier League." Keane, backed by the Sunderland chairman, Niall Quinn, spent heavily on new players last summer, taking his total outlay as manager in two years close to £70m, and there was concern among the new owners that the players were poor value for money. "I think he [Keane] is disappointed with his own performance and also felt pressure from the new owners considering the money he had spent," added Andersson. "The former owners were Irish and they were probably a bit more relaxed in their relationship with Keane because he is a legend in Ireland." The Sunderland players, however, appear to have been taken aback by some of Keane's methods and Andersson suggests there was a clash of culture with some of the foreign players. "The French players that we bought, such as [Djibril] Cissé, have a different mentality to what Keane has and that dynamic did not work," he said. "The players did not respond in a positive manner to Keane's coaching mentality." Andersson went on to indicate that the club may now look abroad in their search for a new manager. "Yes, it is likely [that they will look abroad]," he said. "We have had 60 people expressing an interest in the job since Keane left and a lot of these are foreign."
Bartons a good player but yeah it was a mistake signing him, Rozenhal is a good player too but he never got a chance, cacapa is shite like i'll give you that
Alan Smith was a quality player until he done his leg in, was never the same after that but to be fair he was lucky to play again because it was a horrific injury.
It was a long time ago he done his leg in though, surely manager should have clicked on by now that hes shite lol
Secretary was Keane-Quinn go-between Theirs was a most unlikely reconciliation. But the improbably convivial relationship between Niall Quinn, the“muppet” who acted like “Mother Teresa”, and Roy Keane, the player Quinn accused of “surgically slaughtering” his manager in Saipan, may not have been as united as it seemed at Sunderland football club. Quinn has said he was “dismayed by reporting” of Keane’s alleged resignation by text message: “This text ‘resignation’ just did not happen. It’s as simple as that and I do not want it to become accepted as fact.” The Sunday Times has learnt that Keane and Quinn avoided each other at the club, communicating only via SMS or through a trusted secretary. The pair, whose mutual enmity was dramatised in the play I Keano, avoided each other during their time together as chairman and manager at Sunderland. During Keane’s tenure as manager, Quinn was expected to “stay clear” of the manager’s way, avoiding the dressing room. It was understood that Keane did not want to see Quinn at the training ground and it became standard practice for the manager and chairman to communicate by text message. Club sources report that if the pair had to communicate in a manner unsuited to text messaging, they used Margaret Byrne, the secretary, as their go-between. It was far from the ideal relationship but as long as the team was winning, no one outside the club noticed. Since Keane’s resignation on Thursday, Quinn has defended his former manager. “I would ask the media to give Roy a break. Down the years they’ve had enough good stories out of him without having to make them up,” he said on Friday.
