ANOTHER season; another press conference to introduce a new Sunderland manager. Like a Jose Mourinho meltdown or Arsenal’s meek surrender in the Champions League, it’s a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ when it comes to preparing for the annual shuffling of the deckchairs at the Stadium of Light.

Yet for all that Tuesday’s inaugural meeting with Sam Allardyce felt grimly familiar, there was something unusual about the way it unfolded. For once, there were no delusions of grandeur, no grand plans about where Sunderland would be in three or four years’ time. Allardyce freely admitted his sole ambition was to keep the Black Cats in the Premier League. His words were the sound of reality biting hard.

For all that Sunderland have spent most of the last decade battling against relegation, that hasn’t really happened before. Every time a new manager (or head coach) has been appointed, their opening address has taken the form of a grandiose vision statement that has quickly become irrelevant.

Niall Quinn spoke of a “magic carpet ride”, Martin O’Neill dreamed of getting Sunderland to play like Barcelona, and even Dick Advocaat, whose appointment was always going to be a short-term one, spoke of developing a club that was entrenched in the upper reaches of the table.

Sunderland have had more five-year plans than the Chinese Communist party. The problem, of course, is that the vast majority have been abandoned after little more than 12 months.

Is it a problem that Allardyce has adopted a radically different path? In an ideal world, it would be. In an ideal world, the Black Cats would be developing a plan and sticking to it, both in terms of the over-arching philosophies that spill down from the club’s owner, Ellis Short, and the personnel who are employed to turn those ideas into reality.

It would be nice to be writing about a Sunderland side with a strong identity, and a playing style that has become entrenched over a number of years. It would be great not to have to go through days like Tuesday, but instead be discussing a manager heading into his fourth anniversary at the club, perhaps with an obvious successor already in place and working underneath him. Ideally, you’d like to be able to look at Short and immediately be able to say, ‘That’s what he wants Sunderland to look like – and that’s how he thinks he’s best going to achieve that’.

Clearly, however, none of those things apply. Instead, when Allardyce returned to Wearside at the start of the week, he inherited a club that continues to drift aimlessly. Off the pitch, it’s hard to say what Short is trying to do. The director of football model appears to have been completely abandoned – if Roberto De Fanti’s appointment was a disaster, then it’s hard to say the choice of Lee Congerton was any better – and the club’s transfer policy remains something that looks like it is cobbled together on the back of a cigarette packet.

On the pitch, things are even worse. Sunderland are still without a Premier League victory, are five points adrift of safety, and have conceded 18 goals in their first eight games. Shambolic doesn’t even come close.

And there in the background looms the Premier League’s new television deal, not so much an elephant in the room as a gigantic skyscraper plunging everything beneath it into shadow. Next season, the team that finishes bottom of the Premier League will be guaranteed a minimum of £99m. Little wonder Short does not want to look any further than the bottom three positions next May.

With all that in mind, it is hard to be too critical of Sunderland’s sudden bout of short-termism. If they fail to survive in the top-flight this season, the long term will be a mess. There’s no getting away from that, so you might as well get it out into the open and attempt to manage expectations accordingly.

That is exactly what Allardyce did on Tuesday, and by openly admitting that 17th position will be something of a triumph, he has ensured he will not be battling against unrealistic ambitions for the remainder of the season, and also cleverly ensured that his own position is shielded from too much flak. Go down? Well, I guess Dick Advocaat was right. Survive? The new manager hasn’t done too badly, has he?

The Northern Echo:

The acid test will be how his approach goes down amongst a fan base that remains as proud and passionate as any in the country. Will Sunderland supporters accept being told to look no further than a potentially painful relegation battle?

The initial signs are positive. Football fans are not stupid and, if anything, Sunderland’s have grown weary of hearing promises that have quickly been broken.

If the online message boards are anything to go by, there has been some grumbling about the perceived limitations of Allardyce’s playing style, but these can quickly be rebuffed. What’s better – playing the odd long ball and winning 1-0, or trying, and failing, to play passing football and being carved apart at home by Crystal Palace and conceding eight at Southampton? If Sunderland have had any kind of playing style at all in the last couple of years, I must have been watching a different team.

Short has made some dreadful decisions over the course of his tenure, but having been handed a conundrum when Advocaat walked out for good, at least the Irish-American has rightly concluded this is no time to be getting ahead of himself.

Sunderland’s position is critical, but Allardyce has proved adept at turning around ailing clubs in the past. It is fair to query what will happen if he keeps them up because, if you keep concentrating on the short term, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. If all you are doing is putting out fires, eventually you are going to get burned.

But those are not worries that should be concerning a club that has won 17 of its last 84 Premier League matches. At the moment, improving that statistic is the only thing that counts.