Bruce: I have got to put some steel into players

Sep 22 2009 by Luke Edwards, The Journal

Steve Bruce has been forced to read the riot act to his players this week. Chief sports writer Luke Edwards looks at why the Sunderland manager's patience has snapped.

IF there has been one question asked about Steve Bruce since he became Sunderland boss it is whether, in his determination to remedy old failings, he has tried to change too much too quickly.

It is an inescapable truth of the business that new managers rarely take control of a successful winning team and Bruce inherited plenty of problems when he arrived back in May.

Whatever the players in the dressing room may like to have thought about their own talent and collective ability, the fact they only managed to avoid relegation on the last day of the previous campaign suggests many of them have struggled in the top flight.

Some more than others, of course, but as a unit the Sunderland squad which Bruce took over less than four months ago was never likely to prove to be a satisfactory one for a new manager with a mission statement to turn the Wearsiders into one of the best teams in England.

However, by shipping out 15 players and signing another seven, Bruce has begun some complex renovation work with all the gentleness of a pneumatic drill. It is a risky policy, but one he is adamant needed to be adopted if he was going to get the players he believes are capable of taking the club on to a higher level.

The ex-Manchester United skipper may have used the size of the squad as an excuse for his determination to get so many players out of the door, but there were deeper reasons for his desire to move so many on.

Bruce believed Sunderland were weak before he sat in the manager’s chair and it seems there has been little to convince him otherwise since he accepted Niall Quinn’s offer to build on the work done by Roy Keane in getting them back in the top flight.

Sunderland are a soft touch. However, their manager is anything but as he resolutely strives to strengthen a side which, mentally at least, remains sadly fragile whenever things do not got their own way.

“I would argue the mentality has not been right here for four years,” said Bruce, given a thorough briefing on the strengths and weaknesses of the Sunderland team from former manager Keane before making up his own mind about their inadequacies.

“We have been up and down here for four years. It goes beyond that, this is what Sunderland have always tended to do. That’s what we have got to change. We have got to get a level of consistency.

“Burnley was a prime example of where we are. We are either at the top of our game or right at the bottom, there’s no middle ground to make sure we get results. That’s the mentality that we will have to change.

“Niall has been here three years and has been saying we have to change it all that time so it’s not going to be easy, and it is going to be a gradual process. That’s what the Premier League is all about. It takes years and even then the Premier League can be so unforgiving because it’s such a difficult league.

“But my experience of it is that you have to show resilience, steel and show a bit of backbone to get you through. I told my players today. We had a meeting at 10.30am and I told them I won’t accept it.

“We can’t just think we will go to a Premier League game and annihilate teams, even though we did that for an hour at Burnley. I was thinking we had a really good team in the first half, but we went from the sublime to the ridiculous in the second half.”

Bruce’s voice has remained soft throughout his critical appraisal of the team’s mental strength. But there is anger bumbling under the surface and it is reasonable to assume the players have seen a different side to their manager ahead of tonight’s Carling Cup tie with Birmingham City.

It is a side Bruce would rather not show, but football management has never been a popularity contest, at least not in the dressing room – where his word is final.

As a player, Bruce was never the most pleasing to the eye, but he knew a thing or two about doing the ugly things in a game which are needed to make a good team an excellent one.

He added: “At the moment, this team does not know how to win ugly, it isn’t willing to do the things which need to be done when things aren’t necessarily going your way in a game.

“The big players, big established Premier League players do it week in and week out. That’s why they’re established. You hope my players have got it, otherwise they can’t play at this level.

“The top players stay at the top because they are able to reach a level of consistency at the very top week in and week out.

“Underneath that we still need players who have that mentality, even if they are not in the top four. They have to have that same sort of mentality – because that is what you need in this league.”