Steve Bruce striving to find right blend

Sep 26 2009 by Mark Douglas, The Journal

Steve Bruce knows that tough choices lie ahead as he tries to turn Sunderland into a Premier League force. Mark Douglas reports.

MONEY can buy you plenty in football, but it can’t create the chemistry that turns potentially good teams into great ones.

Having lavished millions of Ellis Short’s cash during a dizzying summer spent jostling with the Premier League’s high rollers, Steve Bruce now begins the part of the job that will ultimately define his Sunderland career.

Sourcing the best players is undoubtedly an art form but turning them into a team – and keeping the simmering discontent of those left kicking their heels on the substitutes’ bench under control – requires a deftness of touch and an eye for detail that only a few possess.

Predecessors Roy Keane and Ricky Sbragia had plenty of qualities but they were never able to mould Sunderland’s collection of talented players into a unit capable of making an assault on the Premier League’s top ten, and ultimately the club stagnated under their tutelage.

Bruce’s track record would suggest that he can find the right blend, but this is when Sunderland supporters start quietly collecting evidence on the matter of whether or not he is the right man for the job.

His first set of examinations come this weekend when he has to sift 11 players from the 18 with pressing claims for first-team duty. His job has been made more difficult by eye-catching cameos from the likes of Jordan Henderson, Fraizer Campbell, John Mensah and Paulo Da Silva – all currently on the fringes of contention.

But Bruce is confident he can handle a squad that he deliberately chose to take an axe to over the summer months. “The most important people for me on Saturday are the ones who do not play,” said Bruce. “That is always the difficulty of management and that’s why I wanted a smaller squad.

“Before we had 28 players and eight or ten were not involved on a Saturday and that can’t be right.

“If they had anything about them they would be causing mayhem. In the Premier League you can only pick 11 and I have got 18 to pick from. There are people who are not going to be happy but that’s my job. Any manager would love to be in my position. In my job you upset people if you need to, but on this occasion it is only because we played extremely well against Birmingham the other night.

“How do I break it to them? Sometimes I pin a team up and sometimes go into a practice match and they’ll have an idea. I won’t be revealing my hand today because otherwise I will have eight players upset and disappointed. I will keep them thinking.