The sky’s the limit for new manager Steve Bruce

Jun 4 2009 by Luke Edwards, The Journal

Steve Bruce is from the wrong side of the North East’s tribal divide, but his appointment as Sunderland manager still felt like a homecoming. Chief Sports Writer Luke Edwards reports

IT has taken Steve Bruce 31 years and 1,222 games as a player and a manager to come home, and nobody is going to ruin his excitement by moaning about where that home once lay.

As a self-confessed Magpie, Bruce used to surreptitiously crawl under the turnstile at St James’s Park to watch his team play, but on this occasion he knew it would be futile to hide from anything.

He is a Geordie from Corbridge who grew up supporting Newcastle United with the same intensity and dedication as any football-mad teenager born and bred on the banks of the Tyne.

Yet, that was then and this is now.

Three decades later, after a successful playing career which took him from Gillingham to Norwich and from Manchester United to Birmingham City, Bruce has returned to his roots as the manager of their bitter rivals in red and white stripes.

It is, even after so many years away, a move which could inflame tribal tension. It is a move which will inevitably be seen as controversial by those blinded by parochial concern. It is a move, though, which Bruce could never allow himself to turn down.