Why brutal Sunderland striker blow could be brilliant news for Arsenal
The Black Cats could be about to bid farewell to a highly promising youth prospect.
They swarmed like termites, or LinkedIn locusts with a penchant for podcasting. When Stewart Donald and Charlie Methven arrived in the boardroom at the Stadium of Light, they said a lot of the right things to a lot of the right people. Hell, they even got rid of some pink seats. For Sunderland supporters, perennially let down and eroded of any optimism, all it took was a smattering of agreeable sound bites and a passion for interior design to sell the dream of a bold new future.
And then the asset-stripping began. Soon it became apparent that Donald and Methven were essentially Burke and Hare in matching M&S chinos. Throughout the club, corners were cut and promises were slashed, and nowhere was this more painfully and bafflingly evident than in the repeated decisions to offload promising youth prospects for relative pittances. As the [EDM continued], Bali Mumba was sold to Norwich City. Local starlet Joe Hugill left for Manchester United. There were other examples besides.
Eventually, of course, Dumber and Dumber packed up their snake oil grift into a donkey-pulled caravan and headed for the hills, pockets presumably bulging with copper wiring from the walls of the club canteen. And since then, things have been – for the most part – much, much better. Under Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, Sunderland have redefined themselves as a bastion to the virutes of youthful exuberance. The Black Cats and their roving guerilla death squad of kindergarten wizards, helmed by sweet-toothed custodian Tony Mowbray, have subverted all expectations of the damage that a blisteringly inexperienced side can dole out. Think Fagan’s gang, but with less musical numbers about petty theft and more sweeping counter-attacks enacted by wire-limbed wingers with bumfluff beards.
On occasion, however, the preposterously prodigious project is tinged with a counterfactual yearning to know how the likes of Mumba and Hugill would have served it. Both, without question, would have been given their chances, and both, almost certainly, would have seized upon them, clamp-jawed and thriving. Not that we will ever know for definite, of course. Disco Stew and Bonnie Prince Charlie, with their combined business acumen like a blind Capuchin monkey running a lemonade stand, saw to that.
But again, lessons have seemingly been learnt, the stings of prior howlers salved. You need only look, for instance, at how Sunderland have clung, white-knuckled and shrieking, to schoolboy crackerjack Chris Rigg in recent times to understand that progress – slow and steady – has been made.
Things don’t always work out how you would like, though. And that brings us, in a tangential sort of way, to Mason Cotcher.
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