At Michael Beale’s first press conference as head coach on Wednesday afternoon, Kristjaan Speakman gave a speech.
Kristjaan Speakman maintains that Sunderland’s head coach still has final say over team selection, although there is ongoing discussion about the team’s long-term growth.
In his last press conference before leaving Sunderland, Tony Mowbray mentioned feeling pressure to keep playing Sunderland’s younger strikers even though he thought they were not nearly ready to start in Championship games. Earlier in the season, Mowbray also hinted that Alex Pritchard’s potential exit from the club before the end of the window may have been the reason for his absence from the starting lineup in the first few weeks of the campaign. This further suggests that Pritchard did not make the decision.
Speaking at Michael Beale’s presentation as Mowbray’s successor, Speakman was asked on more than one occasion about how the process works.
“On team selection, it’s like training, it’s like a lot of things, the reason we all do what we do is that we’re obsessed with football,” Speakman said.
“We all come in from a different angle and we sit in a really open environment as we have done with player recruitment. Not in terms of team selection for a Saturday, but just in terms of how the team is going to evolve and what it’s going to look like. Ultimately, the coach has to make that judgement call at the end to say, ‘this is the team that I’m going with’. We’re always trying to merge the game strategy i.e how do we beat Coventry and align that with how do we continually improve the team and get better over a period of time. Sometimes that can provoke more difficult discussions and there’s a complexity to it, but ultimately the coach has to be able to pick a team that can do the job on a Saturday.
“Different coaches will make different choices, of course, and what we want to try and do over a period of time they’re aligned with the types of players you’re bringing in, because you want to be efficient [in your recruitment]. We’re really comfortable with that.”
Speakman added that during the season, the team meets with individual players to discuss development plans and evaluate team performance. These sessions are conducted in conjunction with the coaching staff.
“We’ve always had loads of review points throughout the season,” he said.
“We have a player audit from a recruitment standpoint before we then go into the recruitment meeting. We have meetings in terms of the development of the players, there’s always loads of open conversations about how the players are progressing and how we ensure we get what they need, and the team gets what it needs in terms of results out on the pitch.
“That’s a balance, sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t. We try to make as many good decisions as we can and ultimately we don’t see it is contradictory in terms of the players we’ve got, we think we’ve got enough depth and variety. It will of course be good for us to get Michael’s view because sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can add something different. We’re as determined as anyone to keep getting better.”
Speakman made clear that all head coaches are expected to build a team within the club’s broader playing style, but said that was never an issue in Mowbray’s case.
“We’re certainly putting pressure on to play a certain style because we’ve got an identity at Sunderland that we need to have,” he said.
“Everybody needs to be aligned with that and Tony certainly was.When Tony came to the football club, we spent hours sat in his living room going through what Sunderland is and how he felt he could add to Sunderland. He came and he did that for us.
“The stuff around the other components, the team selection is the coach’s choice and when it comes to recruitment, the coach has a huge say. We don’t sign players that the coach doesn’t want. Ultimately, we have to try to ensure those players are able to come and hit the ground running. Sometimes they hit the ground running straight away, sometimes they take a little bit longer. There’s loads of context in there, some of which is sometimes difficult for fans and stakeholders to understand. Sometimes, in our position, you’re trying to communicate that and give everyone the true picture, but there’s so much that goes into it with the amount of conversations we have about players. I didn’t see Tony’s interviews towards the end, but I think Tony should be really proud about the work he put in at Sunderland and he’s welcome back any day.”
Speakman also insisted that the club’s aim to develop young talent and make the club sustainable financially did not have to come at the expense of their promotion ambitions.
“I don’t think the two things are contradictory – you want sustainable success,” he said.
“There’s been teams over the recent years that have found themselves in play-off positions and very close to the Premier League, but then the year after have found themselves very close to relegation. We’re trying to grow in the appropriate stages, but we don’t feel that that should be contradictory to being at the top end of the table.
“Our ambition at the minute is to have an opportunity to get promoted. As we sit today, it has the context of how the league table looks, and a couple of teams have obviously got out ahead of us. But success in the short term is having that opportunity to get promoted, and then behind the scenes, we have to keep building to be a Premier League club.
“From a stadium and training-ground perspective, you’ve got the infrastructure in place, but there’s so much behind the scenes around the people and processes to make sure you can keep rolling out success year after year. That doesn’t happen just by having a coach or a team – it’s a lot deeper and there’s a lot more to it than that. That’s what we’re working really, really hard to have.”
