Settled strike duo can lift the gloom

Nov 15 2008 by Mark Douglas, The Journal

As Roy Keane faces down the most troubling spell of his managerial career, he is looking to Kenwyne Jones and Djibril Cissé to start hitting it off together. Mark Douglas reports.

ROY Keane occupies one of the safest managerial seats in the Premier League, but job security is no protection against the introspection of Sunderland fans concerned about the club’s failure to progress this season.

Despite the most troubling run of results of his fledgling managerial career, and the lingering scepticism that still surrounds most of his marquee summer signings, there is no prospect of Keane being troubled with his P45 anytime soon.

He retains the unmitigated support of chairman Niall Quinn and the club’s Drumaville backers, and even a fifth successive defeat at Ewood Park this afternoon will not shake their belief that Keane is the man to lead Sunderland beyond an annual scrap for survival and into the Premier League’s next level.

But, while most supporters share the optimism of Quinn and the board, they are looking for Keane to formulate a more cogent recovery plan than he has managed to conjure up so far this term.

Shuffling his pack on a weekly basis has been a common theme of Keane’s time in charge, but so far this season it has inflicted nothing but inconsistency on the Black Cats.

So it will come as a relief to some that the problem of finding a settled front two – a dilemma yet to be solved as we enter the fourth month of the Premier League season – is apparently solved.

Djibril Cissé, as dangerous as any striker in the Premier League on his day, will be partnered by the returning Kenwyne Jones, who Keane sees as a vital part of any Black Cats revival. There are doubts over whether the pair can flourish together, but Keane believes they have the potential to operate successfully in tandem.

There were encouraging signs from Jones in Wednesday’s Carling Cup defeat by Blackburn, but Cissé was relatively quiet – and an improvement will have to be registered if Sunderland are to inflict revenge on Paul Ince’s men this afternoon.

“You look at other strike partnerships in the Premier League and it takes a hell of a long time, especially when one is just coming back from an injury,” Keane explained.

“It’s well and good when they start off the season and have a pre-season and they are both up and running fitness-wise. I do not think we will see the best of them for a while but it has the potential, like lots of other partnerships in our team.

“Kieran Richardson and Dean Whitehead seem to have that partnership doing really well in the middle of the park but we are still looking at the two centre-halves. At the moment we just have not had that stability due to injuries.”

It is either an indictment of the millions spent this summer or a reaffirmation of Keane’s prescience last pre-season that Jones is viewed as such a pivotal part of the recovery plans.

Certainly, none of the summer arrivals have made as immediate an impact as Jones did with his seven crucial goals last season – and Keane admits they have missed him. “Without a doubt he is a leader on the pitch,” he said. “You saw what happened when he came on at Stoke and he has the potential to lead from the front. Trust me, that is what we are going to need over the next few weeks.

“We will find out the men from the boys over the next few weeks, without a shadow of doubt. And Kenwyne Jones has a chance because I look at him in his position and he has the potential to lead from the front in that role.

“Different people lead in different ways, though. Dean Whitehead leads in a good way in the way he trains. He is not one for ranting and raving but he leads in other ways and perhaps Kenwyne can lead with his physical presence – the way he plays, the way he scores goals. I look at other strikers – Michael Owen’s a captain and so was Alan Shearer.

“They were about putting the ball in the back of the net so Kenwyne has a good chance of leading us.

“We will need him over the next weeks and months because it is a testing time for everyone. It is frustrating but you cannot shy away from these challenges, that is what football at this level is all about.”

Sunderland’s lack of firepower has been one of the most troubling aspects of their start to the season, made even more of a concern by the amount of money laid out on trying to correct it over the summer.

As well as Cissé, Keane recruited Steed Malbranque, El-Hadji Diouf and David Healy as part of his restructuring process but none of them have significantly improved Sunderland’s creativity on a consistent basis.

“We certainly do not score enough goals and are always putting ourselves under pressure,” said Keane.

“For all our all-round good play and good balls into the box, we are putting ourselves under pressure and the chances are we are going to get punished for it.”

“It happened on Saturday and again on Wednesday. The only time my keeper seems to be working is when he picks the ball out of the net.

“I don’t recall him making too many saves. That is not a criticism of him, just a fact.

“It’s not a case of us coming in afterwards, having been battered and Márton Fülöp or Craig Gordon making 10 great saves. I have been to watch Blackburn play Chelsea and their keeper made five or six unbelievable saves and Petr Cech made two great saves. We are not being tested in that way.

“Our problems are a combination of lots of stuff, seeing the danger, smelling the danger, all of them getting used to playing with each other – all those things.

“We have chopped and changed the back four and it does unsettle things because, at start of season, we did want to have a settled back defence including our goalkeeper.

“At the moment so many little things are going against us – I really think that.”