00:00Which I want to talk a little bit about because it's been a bit of a theme over the last few weeks that people have asked about it.
00:05Anthony says, how much are we still suffering from Mike Dodds not being there to help RLB?
00:10Tom Shiny says, another defeat and an almost identical goal to so many previous games.
00:14Teams have definitely targeted our weaknesses and crosses and we haven't scored a goal in the second half of nine games.
00:18Has Regis lost his way since Dodds' departure?
00:21So I think this is a really interesting question and I'll sort of say from the start,
00:26it's an almost impossible one definitively, not in the dressing room, not around it all the time.
00:31Really hard to pick up on that.
00:33But I think I can maybe give a little bit of insight and give my opinion on it.
00:36So I think that Mike Dodds is very probably being missed by some of the players in the sense that
00:42Mike Dodds over a long period of time built up really, really strong relationships with a lot of these players in the dressing room.
00:48Not just the younger players either, to be honest.
00:51A lot of the senior players he had really, really close ties with.
00:53And I do wonder if that sort of more human touch, if you like, that closeness that he has,
01:01that ability that maybe he would have had to pick up on the players' moods, how they're feeling,
01:05maybe where they need some support or whatever.
01:07I think it's natural that that would be missed.
01:09I think Mike Dodds leaving will definitely have left a little bit of a gap in the coaching staff,
01:14if that makes sense, because he did, because just purely from the fact that he was there for such a long time
01:19and he'd been through a lot with those players, he'd built up those relationships.
01:22So my feeling is it's probably a little bit of a factor.
01:25I'm not convinced that there has been a tactical shift because Mike Dodds has left the coaching staff,
01:31if that makes sense.
01:32I actually think that Sunderland have a coaching set up.
01:38I think Mike Dodds is quite aligned in the way he sees the game with Labrice and the other coaching staff.
01:42I think if you think back to the way that Sunderland got quite often set up towards the end of last season under Mike Dodds,
01:48defensively, apart from one or two major exceptions, don't get me wrong, like the Blackburn game,
01:54and we saw it in his previous interim stints, for example, when we beat Leeds and West Brom,
01:57the defensive strategy, the organisation and the structure of the team was always pretty good.
02:02There were days when, for whatever reason, the players didn't turn up and Sunderland got picked off.
02:05But generally speaking, I don't think there was any ever major doubts about Mike Dodds' ability to set the team up defensively.
02:10I think that the issues that Sunderland were having more often than not towards the end of last season was in the final third,
02:16and that's something that's continued.
02:18So I'm not sure that tactically, you know, that there's been a shift since Mike Dodds left.
02:23I think it's what we're seeing is really a continuation of some of the issues that Sunderland have had for really the best part of 18 months
02:29since Tony Mowbray left.
02:30For me, there's like a bit of a question about how the level really consistently of Sunderland's attack and play since that point,
02:38to be quite honest, apart from that burst at the start of the season when Sunderland looked a really, really good counter-attacking team.
02:45So, yeah, hopefully, you know, it's one of those things that you can't give a different advance on from an outside point of view.
02:49But, yeah, my feeling is that Mike Dodds probably is a miss.
02:53And, you know, it's well known what a good coach he was, how close he was with the players.
02:57But I don't think it's anything to do with the tempo and the tactics of the team, to be honest.
03:02I think that I think this is the preferred, generally speaking.
03:06I think there was a lot of alignment on that behind the scenes.
03:10David said, is this just a matter of...
Comments