Stéphane Sessègnon was a first-team fixture under Steve Bruce yet it has taken a change of manager to give him any stability, writes STUART RAYNER

WHENEVER there is a new occupant of the manager’s office at a football club, there are inevitably changes.

Change is something Stéphane Sessègnon has had too much of in 2011, but it looks like this one could at last be a change for the better.

On the face of it, there has not been any great revolution since Steve Bruce was handed his P45 and Martin O’Neill arrived in his place.

The only alterations from the team caretaker manager Eric Black picked against Wolverhampton Wanderers to O’Neill’s first 11 were enforced by suspension (Lee Cattermole) and injury (Nicklas Bendtner).

To date only 13 players have been used from the start, and when Everton visit the Stadium of Light this afternoon, four games down the track, it would be a surprise if the usual suspects were not entrusted with securing three more much-needed points once again.

But if the personnel are much the same, plenty of other things have changed.

Towards the end of Bruce’s managership there was both a staleness and an instability about the Black Cats.

After a barn-storming first half of last season which confounded all expectations, the man in the dugout seemed to have run out of steam. In his desperate attempt to regain the momentum lost so dramatically 12 months ago and hampered by a seemingly endless succession of injuries, Bruce’s team-sheet changed with head-spinning regularity. Even though he was a regular in the side, few suffered more than Sessègnon.

The Benin international only arrived in January, a £6m signing from Paris Saint-Germain.

Despite Sunderland’s obvious need for a centre-forward when the departure of Darren Bent was compounded by injury to Danny Welbeck, Sessègnon started his Wearside career as a left-winger. It is often the way with creative players in England, forced on to the periphery of a team in an attempt to make use of their flair without suffering for their mercurial nature.

When Asamoah Gyan was also struck down by injury, Sessègnon finally moved inside. Even then his role changed, sometimes restricted to the role of lone striker, other times allowed to drift off a targetman when one was available.

The pre-season saw Gyan and Sessègnon in tandem, and it worked well. Able to forage for the ball and delve into his bag of flicks, tricks and clever passes, Sessègnon caught the eye. But as the proper stuff got under way, Bruce began to fret over Sessègnon’s inability to find the net as often as he could the right pass. Without the contributions from elsewhere that would have allowed the Black Cats to carry him in that regard, by the end of Bruce’s tenure, Sessègnon was back on the margins, patrolling the left flank.

Where there was confusion from Bruce, there is clarity from O’Neill. When he speaks the man from Northern Ireland can sometimes come across as a little befuddled, setting off in one direction at the start of the sentence, then changing course in the middle. But when it comes to picking football teams, he is a lot more single-minded. O’Neill knows how he wants the game to be played, and once he has set his heart on a team, he tends to stick with it.

For Sessègnon that means he is once more at No.10, and this time his job prospects look a lot more secure. “I can understand it, because when you are searching around for a system to play in and maybe you think Sess doesn’t get enough goals then maybe he could cause a problem out wide,” says O’Neill, his thoughts spilling from his brain in typical fashion.

“It was interesting against Blackburn (the Ulsterman’s first game in charge at Sunderland). I thought he did cause problems going down the sides (despite being given a free role in the middle).”

Both men, though, will demand the same thing of Sessègnon at the heart of the action – goals. The man who charged down the field at Loftus Road on Wednesday before producing a feint which put in-form goalkeeper Paddy Kenny on his backside and finding the net did not look like the sort of “jigsaw” striker who falls to pieces in the box. You can be sure it is a message a renowned man-motivator like O’Neill will be drumming into Sessègnon.

“Maybe with his lack of goals and not getting into the area he feels his best work is done out of the box,” admits O’Neill. “It would be great if he was prolific but I believe he is capable of scoring more goals. Wednesday’s was a great finish and the little dummy to the goalkeeper was fantastic when he went clear.

“I just want him to be able to get hold of the ball. There is a time to flick it here and there but I want him to get hold of it like proper centre forward. I think there is more to come from him.”