Pete Sixsmith looks at a vital win achieved without a manager, and like Black, Jimmy Stewart and the population of Bedford Falls he decides that football is a Wonderful Life – when you are winning!!

Wasn’t it nice to see and hear a Sunderland manager laughing and joking with the ladies and gentlemen of the press on Saturday? After listening to Mick McCarthy’s often tortured and convoluted attempts to get one over on the media, followed by Roy Keane’s ‘Who are you to challenge me on anything?’ attitude, Ricky Sbragia comes across as an easy going, relaxed kinda guy, who is comfortable with his situation and who just loves working with players.

Some of the routines that Roy brought in, which I gather made many of the players see the SoL as Stalag Keaneo, have been dropped. I would imagine that the management at The Ramside are disappointed and that Durham’s taxi drivers are cursing the departure of the Bearded One, but the decision to allow the players to spend the night in their own beds (or that of someone close to them), seems to have had a positive effect.

For many of us, a night away from home is an adventure, a chance to eat and drink the contents of the mini-bar, complain about the shower head, run up and down the corridor in your underpants and scoff a huge breakfast that you don’t really want but you’ve paid for, so you might as well wolf it down. I guess if you are doing it every week it becomes a bit of a drag.

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