Sunderland endured a season of consistent misery and underachievement and have to be grateful that there were two extremely poor teams in the league this season, in QPR and Reading, for the fact that they are staying up. Martin O'Neill started his first full season in charge looking to build on from the relatively successive second half of last season when the lifted the mood around the club. And indeed, the Black Cats went five games without a loss at the start of the season while holding Arsenal and Liverpool to draws. However, all of that was based on solid form from the defenders while the team was obviously lacking in any coherency and ideas up front. A thumping 3:0 loss at Manchester City provided a rude awakening and kicked off a very poor run of form in the autumn months. Summer signing Steven Fletcher was coming up with the goals up front but he was doing all on his own with Adam Johnson struggling badly at his new team and James McClean and Stephane Sessegnon displaying nothing like the form from the previous season. Fletcher was actually the only Sunderland player to score in the Premier League all the way until late November when they lost 2:4 to West Brom. By then, the murmurs of discontent among the fans were more then clear and there were strong rumours that O'Neill will be sacked. The quality of the performances remained dreadful with no attacking impetus or any sense of control from midfield. There was a slight improvement in December when the Black Cats won three out of four games, including a 1:0 victory over Manchester City. O'Neill was hoping that this run will kick-start the campaign at long last but Sunderland remained too scared to play to their potential and started to sink again from February onwards. Defeats to both Reading and QPR were part of a run of eight games without a win going to early April and by then Sunderland were in deep deep trouble. Fletcher, already struggling to reproduce the form from the early part of the season, got injured on international duty and would not play any more for the rest of the season. That meant that Sunderland looked even more impotent and pliantly scared to play and an absolutely pitiful display in a 1:0 home loss to Manchester United finally got O'Neill the sack just before Easter. His replacement was controversial Italian Paolo di Canio who immediately had to front questions about his fascist views and was put under the microscope. Yet, the team immediately looked a tad sharper and more ambitious with Di Canio in charge as managed to install some spark and fire into the players. He got an incredible 3:0 win away at bitter rivals Newcastle only in his second game in charge and then managed to get the points against Everton in the next game too. Suddenly there was a feel-good factor around Sunderland but that was swept away after a 6:1 hammering suffered at Aston Villa the week after. Sunderland would get only two points for the rest of the season but just about beat the drop and will hope for better campaign next season and Di Canio is already promising drastic changer and higher level of discipline.
