No one said the Championship would be easy, and Sunderland getting important reality check

Sunderland are learning the harsh lesson that many other clubs have before them: The Championship is a brutal dogfight.

Nobody said the Championship was going to be easy, right? That’s certainly proving to be the case as the season slips away from Sunderland.

Three defeats in a row for the Black Cats against bottom-half teams have left them well-and-truly off the play-offs pace and it’s incredibly frustrating for everyone.

The other thing it probably is, though, is a reality check.

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Last season was brilliant for Sunderland. In fact, it was one of the most enjoyable that I can remember as a fan.

There was this talented young team, led on the pitch by a truly top class player in Amad Diallo, playing without fear and expectation. That translated into the stands too. There were no ‘must-win’ games to stress over and everything felt like a bonus.

In many ways, the season as a whole felt like a victory lap after finally getting out of League One and having our day at Wembley. It was a celebration, perhaps even a honeymoon period to what felt like a brand new special relationship between supporters and the club.

The bad stuff didn’t feel so bad, and the good stuff felt absolutely brilliant. Nothing could bring us down and every day was a fresh adventure.

Reality, though, has to eventually set in, and that reality is that Sunderland are in an incredibly difficult division, fighting for success from the low ground in a notoriously uneven battlefield.

Every year the Championship gains three Premier League squads operating with Premier League budgets. This season, for example, Leicester City bought a full England international at his career peak with 128 Premier League appearances to his name, as well as some Champions League games.

Sunderland play Leicester in two weeks. Next week they play Norwich, who were not in the Premier League last season but will still, this year, receive more money from the Premier League as bonus funds than Sunderland’s entire turnover will be.

Meanwhile, Sunderland themselves were a third tier club less than two years ago. That’s not an excuse, it’s just a fact.

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The point is really that there is ambition, and ambition is a good thing. In fact, at a club like Sunderland it is an essential thing. However, there is also a reality to be faced, and the reality is that it was always going to be immensely difficult to breeze through the Championship in a year or two.

Certainly, one look at recent history will show you that it’s incredibly rare for any clubs to do it. In fact, people were surprised at how quickly Luton did it, and they needed three years for it.

Sunderland are, of course, a much bigger club than Luton. The days of that being enough are long over, though. You can’t just say: ‘we’re a massive club’ and expect anything to happen. It helps with some things, of course, but in terms of income and resources, it doesn’t give any real advantage anymore.

What that means is that the Championship ends up being a dogfight, perhaps even the dirtiest and most competitive in world football, with probably as many as 20 clubs ever year believing they can get promoted.

The last three games have pretty much proven without any real doubt that Sunderland, for now, are not equipped to win that dogfight. They quality is probably there, but the nous, experience, physicality and mental strength isn’t.

There is no shame in that either, by the way, not at this stage. Not going from League One to the Premier League in two years is not a failure of leadership or ownership. That really cannot be stressed enough.

The big question that Sunderland need to answer is how to they give themselves the edge in the dogfight, and there will be no shortage of theories, especially among the supporters, for how they can achieve that.

For now, though, a brief pause for a reality check and to take stock might just be exactly what is needed. Sunderland are still on course for a return to the Premier League. This season hasn’t thrown them off it, or really even delayed it. It has just been part of the process – albeit an incredibly frustrating one. 

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