Amad Diallo cost Manchester United £25m and Édouard Michut trained alongside Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé at Paris Saint-Germain, but they receive no special privileges from Tony Mowbray.
The Sunderland manager’s insistence on good habits – on and off the pitch – involves all players, star loanees included, routinely brushing down their boots and hanging them on the correct peg. Instead of allowing dirty shorts and socks on the dressing room floor, they must be picked up and turned inside out, ready for the kit man to place in the washing machine.
Out on the grass, Sunderland’s manager offers constant reminders to Diallo and company to look up, identify space, play on the half turn, run with the ball and deliver it into the right places. “You have to change habits and it’s not always easy,” says Mowbray. “It takes young players time.”
Perhaps, but given that his team have the youngest average age – at 23 – in this season’s Championship and were promoted from League One only last year, they appear to be swift learners.
Sunderland also play the sort of well-structured yet often thrilling football which should offer Luton cause for concern before their visit to the Stadium of Light for Saturday evening’s playoff semi-final first leg.
Rob Edwards, Luton’s manager, may be encouraged by the injuries which have reduced Sunderland’s average height to 5ft 8in and left the former Chelsea and West Ham midfielder Pierre Ekwah as the only fit first-teamer standing over 6ft tall, but their collective ball-playing skills are not to be underestimated.
With Mowbray having finally found a way to compensate for the loss of the Scotland centre-forward Ross Stewart to an achilles rupture in January, his side secured sixth place after concluding the league programme on a nine-game unbeaten run. It speaks volumes that Michut, an extremely promising midfielder who has appeared in PSG’s first team, is regularly a substitute.
Stewart, dubbed the Loch Ness Drogba by Wearsiders, had scored 10 goals in 13 league appearances and his absence placed considerable responsibility on Diallo’s slender shoulders. With 13 goals in 37 second-tier matches, the 20-year-old has not only responded magnificently but emphasised why he played in the Champions League for Atalanta as a teenager and Manchester United invested so heavily in his potential.
“My gut feeling is that, if Amad doesn’t go back to Old Trafford next season, he’ll join a top Spanish club for big money,” says Mowbray, whose lack of fit centre-halves has prompted him to joke that, at 59, he may have to make a comeback against Luton. “But promotion could give us a chance of keeping Amad for another season. Let’s see – it’s a shame we didn’t agree a two-year deal!”
Mowbray took charge of Sunderland on 30 August last year – a day before Diallo’s arrival – after Alex Neil’s defection to Stoke. At the time, the message from a board led by the trust-fund billionaire Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, the majority owner, was that finishing somewhere around 12th would represent a decent campaign.
Not that Mowbray has ever much cared for targets in his personal, or football, life. The death of his first wife from breast cancer at the age of 26 taught him the futility of forecasting the future, and he has always regarded certainty and football as strangers.
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“This team’s done extremely well considering the circumstances and the injuries we’ve had; instead of having a target man we’ve had to find ways of filling the box with midfielders or wingers and that can become difficult, ” he says. “I don’t think there was an expectation of back-to-back promotions. My feedback was about consolidation.”
The former Blackburn, Middlesbrough, Celtic and West Brom manager had perhaps not bargained on the richly gifted Diallo, Ekwah, Alex Pritchard, Jack Clarke and Patrick Roberts challenging the Championship’s received wisdoms.
“When you give them the ball and they’re looking to really damage the opposition they’re seriously talented footballers,” says Mowbray, who has sometimes deployed Pritchard, a former Tottenham midfielder, as a false 9. “Pierre has amazing feet. Sometimes the biggest challenge is to make them play serious football; to remind them it’s not the playground and you can’t take too many touches.”
As an outstanding young defender at Middlesbrough in the late 80s Mowbray played in a similarly improvisational team who, against all financial odds, rose from the third to top tier in successive seasons under his mentor, Bruce Rioch.
Like Boro back then, Sunderland are far from awash with cash but Mowbray balks at suggestions it is too early for another promotion. “The Premier League has the riches to build your club faster,” he says. “It’s never too soon.”
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