CREDIT: JAMES BOYCES
Gustavo Poyet was shown the door when after 30 regular season games, Sunderland AFC only had four victories on its belt.

There is a lot to be admired in the modern day soccer climate when a club is seen to stick with its manager even as results are going against the team in question. Far too often, the club ownership will drop the knife on a manager at the drop of a hat, tossing out the contract and moving on to the next man in the hope of a miraculous change in form.

In the two previous seasons, both of which showed unusually high manager turnover, it is unlikely that a boss would have been entering the 30th week of the Premier League with only four victories, yet still have his job.

Sunderland AFC manager Gustavo Poyet was able to do just that, leaving the club with a W-D-L record of 4-14-11, and just a single point above the relegation zone before he was finally shown the door March 16. With only eight matches remaining in the season, his replacement will now face the absolutely unenviable task of salvaging a scrap of cohesion in a team unit that has shown little so far.

The timing of the sacking and the situation the new manager will face calls into question whether Poyet should have been removed earlier than he was to allow his replacement adequate time to save the club from the drop. While I’m never an advocate for a manager to lose his job, it has to be said that from a wholly non-romantic point of view, Poyet was not performing the job that he was hired to do, something that would see professionals in other fields pay with their job.

Previous seasons have shown that the clubs who are in danger of relegation and wait until late in the season to replace the man in charge have had no luck with escaping the drop. Last season, Norwich’s Chris Hughton was removed from his post on April 6, giving his replacement no time to scrape results with an underachieving team. Even managers that were replaced months earlier found themselves unable to halt the damage and salvage something from the season. The other two relegated sides replaced their bosses in February and December.

Recent updates have come in that Sunderland have signed Dutch manager Dick Advocaat, who, over a 35- year coaching career, has managed teams all over the world to varying degrees of success. On a club level, Advocaat is known for his time in the Dutch league with PSV Eindhoven in the 1990’s, a four-year stint with Rangers in Scotland and Russian club Zenit St. Petersburg during their high profile grab for glory from 2006 to 2009. Most of his time has been spent on the international stage, managing the teams of Netherlands, UAE, South Korea, Russia and Serbia, none of which were glory-laden stints at the helm.

With no experience in England, turning to a manager like Dick Advocaat is certainly a calculated gamble, as his experience and gravitas should influence the tactics on the field. But as harsh as it may be, the club might find themselves thinking that they should have brought him in earlier, at the expense of the hard-working Poyet.