Jon Stead has left the building. See you then Jonathan, goodnight and God bless. Thanks for all your help, you will never be forgotten - that’s right, never forgotten for being one of the worst Sunderland strikers ever.
There are those who will have greeted the news yesterday that Stead has left the club for Derby County, a switch which is likely to become a permanent one when the transfer window re-opens in January, with an outburst similar, if not harsher than this.
Those feelings are understandable when you consider this is a player who was signed for almost two million pounds to score the goals to keep Sunderland in the Premiership just a little over a year after he had snubbed the club in favour of a move to Blackburn Rovers because they were a division higher.
He was a player who arrived with a big reputation and a high profile, but went on to score just two goals in 40 appearances for the club. If one signing cost Mick McCarthy his job as Sunderland manager it was Stead. Oh, alright then two, who could forget Andy Gray?
When you have roughly £10m to spend to make your squad fit for the Premiership you do not spent almost £2m of it on a duff striker do you.
Yet, for all of the cheap gags - and Sunderland were a laughing stock before Roy Keane rode in on his white horse, or arrived by car, whatever - about Stead, I honestly don’t think he deserves to be despised.
To be fair, while the vast majority of Sunderland fans gave up on the 23-year-old ever cutting the mustard at the Stadium of Light sometime ago, they never turned on him, they never booed him -something fairly common down the road at St James’s Park - and they never made him a scapegoat.
Why? Because Jon Stead was one of the nice guys, courteous and articulate. Some would say too nice to be a centre forward.
He was a young man with a big price tag he did not choose to have. He was a young man at a big club with big expectations who never stopped working hard, who never hid and who never whined or moaned about a lack of service or support from his manager or teammates.
Stead was, to use an over-used phrase, an honest professional and the joy with which teammates and supporters alike greeted his first and only goal for the club in the Premiership, against Everton at Goodison Park, illustrated just how much they appreciated what he had been through.
So Jonathan should leave, not with a boot up his backside, but with our best wishes. He was a disastrous signing, but impossible to dislike, a failure who most will wish every future success.
As long as he doesn’t score against the Black Cats when he returns with Derby later in the season of course.
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