Sunderland’s Wing Woes: Does Le Bris Need More Width?

So there I was, standing in a corridor of the Malmaison Hotel, Graeme Souness fixing me with his death-stare version of what we know in these parts as the ‘hacky look’.

“Son,” he said, endeavouring to further put me in my place (this was 2004, I was 42), “people in the game don’t talk about ‘wingers’. We call them ‘wide-working players’.”

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I had clearly hit a nerve. Myself and my fellow scribblers (plus the Tyneside public, to be fair) had been banging on for some time about the lack of width in Souness’ Newcastle side. “The wingless Magpies,” I’d referred to them in print, more than once.

It crossed my mind, though I thought better of mentioning it, that I was once a trialist right winger at Middlesbrough – at the same time that Graeme Souness was club captain, in fact.

It was tattie-picking week in 1976. The first team were top of ye olde First Division and playing away somewhere. Natty new tracksuits with autograph-style players’ names on the back hung in the Ayresome Park dressing room.

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We were mini-bussed out to the Hutton Road training ground and spent the morning doing shuttle runs and drills with the youth team. The trial match came in the afternoon: the young wannabes against a Boro youth team that included three future Sunderland stars (Stan Cummins, David Hodgson and Mark Proctor) and a little Aussie kid in midfield they all called ‘Skippy’ (Craig Johnston, a future European Cup winner alongside ‘Hodgy’ with Liverpool and inventor of the adidas Predator boot).

It was not a fair fight.

Still, I must have made a few decent runs playing up the Hutton Road slope because the youth team coach came on to mark me for the second half. He was rather portly, a double for the Fat Bob character in the Oor Wullie cartoon strip.

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“Just knock the ball over the top for me,” I shouted to our midfielders, perhaps rather too loudly, nodding in the direction of the youth team’s new overage left-back.

Excuse the smoke blowing, but I was a county schools sprint champion at the time. Just a month before, I’d shown a clean pair of heels to the Boro Boot Boys who ambushed us from the train station to the away end at Ayresome Park, where Houghton-born Alan Willey scored both goals for the home side in a 2-1 Sunderland defeat.

In that second half at Hutton Road, I took one hell of a metaphorical kicking, right to the solar plexus. There was no way I was going to make any kind of grade as a footballer.

I was sewn up in the back pocket of Middlesbrough’s Fat Bob of a Scottish youth team coach. I’d rather underestimated the enduring class of Bobby Murdoch, midfield lynchpin of Celtic’s 1967 European Cup-winning side.

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And so…

Fifty years on, as a never-was footballer, has-been hack and now avid Sunderland supporter all over again, one enduring concern is how Régis Le Bris goes about filling his right and left flanks.

Many would say that Sunderland have become wingless wonders in their season and a quarter in the top flight.

On the evidence of the Premier League games up to and including being sent to Coventry, then, Houston, we certainly do have a problem. On the evidence of some of the cup games and the revival against Chelsea, maybe not.

The tone of the Chelsea triumph was set by Chemsdine Talbi’s two early surging runs down the left. It was classic attacking wing play, reminiscent of Dennis Tueart on the same flank at Roker Park.

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The Moroccan number seven proceeded to show the wide-working traits that are perhaps even more essential now than they were in Graeme Souness’ now-distant management days. In short: Sunderland have a winger of World Cup pedigree, oven-ready for Premier League battle.

Trai Hume was not exactly drawn from right-wing central casting. Neither was Thomas Meunier. Yet, between them, the right-back from Northern Ireland and the wing-back from Belgium more than shored up the right flank against Chelsea; they owned it.

Some of us may still pine for another dynamic wide boy, but Jocelin Ta Bi and Nilson Angulo have shown glimpses of class on the cup front recently. They have time to come good – as does Malick Fofana, whose £38m worth has yet to become truly evident.

Then there is Timur Tutierov, a young winger by trade who surely deserves a shot at proving his worth in his specialist position – perhaps in a suitable cup tie or two.

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Of course, we all have our thoughts on the merits of particular wingers. My two favourites in six decades of following Sunderland are Dennis Tueart and Nicky Summerbee.

Dennis was an absolute menace for opposition full-backs: quick and direct, adept in the art of the pinpoint whipped-in cross, a clinical finisher too.

Nicky was a master of efficiency, delivering those precise early crosses that led to so many goals during Sunderland’s last period (before last season) of occupancy in top-flight nosebleed territory.

He did, it must be said, have the considerable advantage of the totem-pole Niall Quinn to aim for, with Kevin Phillips ready to pounce with his deadly finishes. At that time, when official Premier League stat sheets started doing the rounds, however, the old chip off Mike Summerbee’s block ranked a close second to the more vaunted David Beckham in the delivery stakes from out wide.

With apologies for the lazy dribble down personal memory lane, thank you for your attention in this matter – as some fellow whose name escapes me is wont to sign off.

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