As Newcastle and Middlesbrough were boring each other into submission in the Tyne-Tees derby on Saturday, Sunderland were making another step back towards the Premiership with a 2-1 win at West Bromwich Albion.
Now, I know there are some Newcastle supporters who disagree, but I believe that can only be a good thing. A great thing for Sunderland supporters, obviously, but a good thing for North-East sport as a whole.
Whatever you thought of Roy Keane as a player and a person before he arrived on Wearside, I don’t think anyone can fail to admire what he has done at the Stadium of Light.
Here come the stats. When Keane took over, the Wearsiders were in the bottom three, they are now in the top four and closing in on an automatic promotion place.
In 2007, Sunderland have played 10 games in the Championship and collected 26 points. Keane has won the manager of the month award for February and the Black Cats have become the most feared team in the division - not bad for a club which chairman Niall Quinn said had the stench of defeat when he took over.
And what does Keane say about this fantastic run of form? Very little really and you get the distinct feeling that if someone was tempted to pat him on the back, he’d grab their wrist and break a couple of fingers.
Ryan Giggs recently reflected that when Keane was in the dressing room after a win at Manchester United he never celebrated, he rarely even smiled. Instead, he looked ahead, not to what he was going to do that night to enjoy the win, but to what challenges lay ahead; what he and the team needed to do to win the next match.
For the rest of us, that might seem like a rather joyless way to look at things. After all, what is the point of success and glory if you can’t revel in it?
But Keane’s point, as he tossed his manager of the month award into his garage this week – I wonder if that’s where he keeps all his medals and trophies – is that Sunderland haven’t achieved anything other than a rise up the table.
They could still miss out on automatic promotion, they could still miss out on the play-offs and they could still be playing their football in the Championship next season. What is there to celebrate at the start of March?
It is not a mentality everyone has and there are some who are tempted to congratulate Sunderland on what they have achieved in the last few months, but it’s a winner’s mentality when winning is everything and everything else is failure.
If Sunderland are promoted at the end of the season, Keane will celebrate – although I doubt whether there will be an open-top bus parade like there was under Mick McCarthy – and then he will start to plan for next season.
When winning is a way of life it is also addictive and Keane is an addict. As he would say, what’s the point of getting promoted if you aren’t going to stay up?
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