Wilkinson faces fight with popular front

Stadium of Enlightenment? Many Sunderland fans see appointments as damning evidence of lack of ambition

It is not the first managerial surprise that has been sprung upon North-east football. Indeed, 10 years ago there were gasps of astonishment from the assembled press corps when the doors of Newcastle Breweries swung open and Kevin Keegan was revealed as Newcastle United's new manager, forecasting an avalanche of success. "It'll be like a snowball rolling down a mountainside," he proclaimed. "Once we start gathering momentum, nothing will stop us." The Newcastle public loved it, just loved it.

The reaction was rather different on Wearside on Thursday when Howard Wilkinson and Steve Cotterill were unveiled to the unsuspecting media – and, in turn, the nonplussed public – as the new management team at the Stadium of Light. John, from Durham, was typical of those Sunderland fans who called the nightly football phone-in show on Century Radio. "We were the laughing stock of North-east football," he observed. "But now we're the laughing stock of British football."

The common consent was that Sunderland AFC could not organise a night of inebriation in a brewery, let alone stage a managerial announcement in one. After two years of watching their team tread water under Peter Reid, the Sunderland faithful wanted a managerial big fish, a "big" name, to uplift their spirits and give promise of big times ahead: a Martin O'Neill, a David O'Leary or a Mick McCarthy. Instead, they got one of the forgotten men of English management giving a hard-nosed reality check.

"If I've been one thing in my life," Wilkinson said, two hours into his new job, "it's been honest. We don't see ourselves as messiahs. Steve and I are taking over a team that's fourth from bottom of the Premiership. So that's on our management CV now. It's on the players' CV now. The objective is very, very clear. We have got to get away from that relegation area as quickly as possible.

"I wouldn't have come here if I didn't think the club had terrific potential. But that's all it is: potential. I don't want to talk about where we might be 12 months from here. I don't even really want to talk about three months from here. At the moment my horizon stretches to the West Ham game next week."

That West Ham game, at the Stadium of Light on Saturday, will be Wilkinson's first in the Premiership since 7 September, 1996. His Leeds United team lost 4-0 at home to Manchester United that day, with Eric Cantona applying the final goalscoring touch in front of the Elland Road Kop. Two days later the Leeds board bowed to popular demand and their manager of eight years was sacked.

Wilkinson would not exactly top a popularity contest on Wearside this weekend, though currying public favour has never been a prime concern of the Football Association's former technical director. "I don't know how the fans will react," he said. "I think what the fans will be interested in is performances and results. And I know the Sunderland public are passionate about Sunderland football club. When we were at Leeds we used to say we were coming to the lion's den up here."

If the home of the Black Cats is anything like a lion's den on Saturday it will be due to the lingering resentment among their supporters. The appointment of a manager who has been out of the club game for six years and an assistant who was managing in the Third Division five months ago has been received as further damning evidence of lack of ambition on the part of the Sunderland board. Over the past two years Sunderland have had the 14th highest average home gates in Europe, the third highest in England. The 48,000 have become increasingly aggrieved that the magnitude of their faith has not been matched by the size of the club's thinking.

Their sense of betrayal dates back to 1990 and 1996, when Sunderland failed suitably to reinforce promoted sides and paid the price of instant relegation. More recently, in the two seasons in which Peter Reid guided the club to seventh place in the Premiership – 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 – qualification for Europe was lost for the want of a little mid-season team-strengthening.

Bob Murray, the club chairman, crowed that Sunderland had not finished successive seasons so prominently placed in England's top division since the glory days of the 1930s and hailed his manager as "the new Brian Clough". The cracks in the team Reid built were glaringly evident, though, even in that second season of relative success. The irresistible attacking force of 1999-2000 had given way to a more prosaic unit overachieving on a diet of dogged team spirit and the goalscoring support Don Hutchison supplied from midfield for Kevin Phillips and Niall Quinn, who were no longer benefiting from the silver-platter right-wing service of Nicky Summerbee – a key player Reid never came close to replacing adequately.

It was no surprise to the Stadium of Light regulars that everything fell apart last season. With Hutchison a West Ham man again, Quinn struggling for fitness, Phillips foraging all over the field in search of possession, and the collective will draining from a team without shape or substance, Sunderland escaped relegation on the final day. Their points return had dropped from 58 to 40 in two seasons, their goals return from 57 to 29.

Eight games into the 2002-2003 season, they are still where they finished last season: fourth from the bottom of the Premiership. Their scoring ratio has dropped to one goal every two games. They have Phillips ready to return after a hernia operation but no money to spend on reinforcements, Reid having saddled the club with a long list of second-rate overseas signings they have been unable to offload.

The job at hand – making the most of the resources available and clearing out the dead wood – is one for a pragmatist and an organiser. And Howard Wilkinson fits the bill on both counts. "It ain't rocket science," he said, pondering the task ahead. "We haven't got anything weird and wonderful tucked in our back pockets. A lot of people who've played for me will groan when they hear me say it, but if you groove a good golf swing you can rely on it when the pressure's on. We have got to get down to getting the little things right and recently it's little things that have cost Sunderland.

"Fulham at home: gave the ball away on the edge of the penalty area. Fulham at home: gave the ball away in our own half. Two-nil down, having battered them for 30 minutes. You can't do that sort of thing at this level and survive. Those are the sorts of things we have got to look at."

The fact that Wilkinson had already been looking at the videos of Sunderland's games, and duly dissecting them, said a lot about the man the Wearsiders have hired to get them back in the Premiership groove. It said a lot too about the man Wilkinson has taken as his assistant that Cotterill spoke for him when the last English manager to guide a team to the English title was asked whether he thought he could achieve the feat with Sunderland. "Not this season," Cotterill interjected.

At 38, 20 years younger than Wilkinson, the Cheltenham man is a graduate of the same school of footballing pragmatism. He is an impressively qualified graduate, too – and not just with his Uefa Pro licence. As a player, Cotterill rose from the ranks of the Beazer Homes League with Burton Albion to the old First Division with Wimbledon. As a manager, he has gained a growing reputation while dragging Cheltenham Town by their bootlaces from the Dr Martens Southern League to the Second Division of the Nationwide League. He was also a notable success with the first club he managed, Sligo Rovers.

He guided them to a place in the Uefa Cup – a feat which, sadly, proved beyond the last manager at Sunderland.