With Di Canio, Sunderland’s real action will be off pitch - Not so much on the pitch, where the delivery of excitement has been more than a touch limited this season. No, the action will all be in the away team’s technical area.
If Sunderland fans thought that their previous manager Martin O’Neill could get a little exercised on the touchline, with his St Vitus Dance twitches and attempts at the world standing high jump record every time his team scored, they have seen nothing compared to what their new man will bring.
For Paolo di Canio, the manager’s job consists of delivering 90 minutes of theatre.
Sunderland supporters should brace themselves for drama when their team take on Chelsea on Sunday.
Never in the history of the Premier League has there been a dugout presence like him. To say he lives every minute of his team’s action is an understatement. Across an hour and a half he rants, he rages, he storms. If you thought Rafa Benitez’s intricate semaphores were entertaining, wait till you see Di Canio flapping.
When he was in charge at the County Ground, Swindon Town supporters found themselves for much of the game looking at the dugout. To let the eyes stray on to the pitch was to miss the real action.
The moment he walks out to take up his position, Di Canio appears to be on the very brink of explosion, Vesuvius on the lip of eruption. Everything and anything sends him into a frenzy. Referees, assistants, the opposition: he will go apoplectic at the merest infraction.
It is not just the open questioning of the integrity of officials that has seen him in hot water. He was once sent to the stands at Swindon simply for the alarming nature of his body language. It was, the referee decided, inappropriate to see a man apparently intent on physical violence storming around on the touchline.
But what most enrages Di Canio, what seems to provoke his fury, is the performance of his own team. A man of such demanding standards he makes Roy Keane look soft, much of his time in the dug-out is spent screaming abuse at his own players.
Or turning round and complaining in the most dramatic fashion to his assistants every time someone does something wrong. Those on the bench will have quickly to learn to listen to him endlessly slagging off their colleagues. Boy, this is a man who takes some pleasing.
In his habit of making very public his critique of his players, Di Canio will find himself unusual among Premier League managers. The orthodoxy in the competition is for bosses to restrict their negative observations to the privacy of the dressing room or the training ground.
Sure, Arsene Wenger, Alex Ferguson, Sam Allardyce and the rest can get very animated on the touchline. But it is usually about a refereeing decision or a foul. Rafa Benitez is so careful about not singling out individuals he won’t even praise them. When invited at press conferences to eulogise a Frank Lampard goal or a Petr Cech save, he will say yes it was good, but so was the performance of the other players.
The only manager who comes close to showing Di Canio’s impatience is Roberto Mancini, who can get very overwrought about his team’s performance. Maybe it is an Italian thing. Or maybe it is a reflection of the fact that, unlike Benitez, Ferguson and Wenger, Mancini and Di Canio were both brilliant footballers themselves, and they shudder when they see their players failing to do what they could easily have managed in their day.
Either way, it does not necessarily promote long term harmony in a dressing room. But it can produce results. As was evidenced at Swindon where the rows, fallings-out and exclusions were legion, even as the team progressed up the league table.
One thing is for sure, Sunday is going to be something new for the Sunderland players. There are those who believe that O’Neill had lost a lot of the energy that once characterised his management. Certainly he looked and sounded very flat in his final appearance on the touchline last weekend. That was reflected, so insiders say, in a kind of laissez-faire attitude around the club. He was frequently absent from training, leaving the detail to his lieutenants.
Well, it won’t be like that with Di Canio. His arrival at the Stadium of Light will have been like chucking an alka seltzer into a still, calm glass of water. All this week he will have been on the training ground in the faces of the players, demanding more, insisting on more, screaming for more.
It may prove short term. He may well crash and burn. As his demeanour on the touchline will suggest, it does not necessarily do much for your club’s wider dignity having a certifiable lunatic in charge.
But watching him in action over the next few weeks, Sunderland supporters may well come to the conclusion that a rocket up the backside of the kind Di Canio will deliver is precisely what is needed to rescue their club from ignominy. After all, they are the ones who have been obliged to watch Adam Johnson this season. // By Eurosport | Jim White
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