IF Sunderland’s experiences over the last year-and-a-half have taught us anything, it is that the phrase ‘a new low’ has become utterly redundant. No matter how bad things become for the Black Cats, they always seem to find a way of making them worse.

A ‘derby’ with Newcastle Under-21s. Shipping five goals at home to Coventry City. Meekly losing the play-off final despite being gifted a goal in the opening five minutes. Suffering three successive away defeats at the hands of those footballing giants, Lincoln, Wycombe and Shrewsbury. Grim, and yet always the possibility that things could get grimmer.

On Saturday, the sight of Jon McLaughlin clambering into a deserted South Stand during an FA Cup first-round draw with Gillingham seemed to neatly summarise Sunderland’s plight, yet just three days later, a new nadir arrived to cast the weekend’s events in an almost positive light.

Yes, the Leasing.com Trophy is an irrelevance. But as a near full-strength Sunderland side crashed to a 3-0 defeat at the hands of a Scunthorpe United team that had won just three League Two games all season, with the travelling contingent in a 1,002-strong crowd serenading them with choruses of ‘You’re not fit to wear the shirt’, it felt like a significant moment. A new low. At least until the next one arrives.

On and off the field, Sunderland feels like a club on the verge of collapse. The positivity that accompanied the start of the club’s spell in the third tier – and for all the unhappiness now, there was some optimism with the arrival of new owners, the appointment of a new manager and the novelty of visiting a raft of new grounds – has completely disappeared. At his very first press conference back in May 2018, director Charlie Methven stated that Sunderland had to start coming to terms with the fact that they were ‘a League One team’. There won’t be many people who doubt that now.

On the pitch, things have gone backwards since Phil Parkinson was appointed as Jack Ross’ successor. That is not to say that Ross should not have been dismissed – things had become stale under the Scotsman, with the deficiencies that resulted in a failure to secure promotion last season remaining unaddressed – and it is also not to say that Parkinson was necessarily the wrong appointment either. In time, the former Bolton and Bradford boss might well mould Sunderland into a decent replica of his previous sides that won promotion from the third tier.

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However, any hopes of a ‘new manager bounce’ have long been banished, and while Parkinson can point to successive home clean sheets in the league as evidence that he has begun to tackle Sunderland’s defensive problems, the rest of the side continues to badly malfunction. The attack is ineffective, the midfield pedestrian and both of Sunderland’s senior goalkeepers appear to lack confidence. That hardly screams promotion.

Parkinson will justifiably claim he needs the January transfer window to open so he can begin to address some of the deficiencies in the squad he inherited, but having been appointed to close the gap that was beginning to open up to the automatic promotion places, there is a very real risk a top-two finish will be out of the question by the time he begins to get his house in order. Methven and Stewart Donald clearly believe the current squad is capable of winning promotion. A record of two wins in eight matches in all competitions under Parkinson suggests otherwise. By comparison, Ross won five of his first eight games this season.

Confidence, which was already fragile, is draining away, and Parkinson is yet to come up with anything that could be regarded as a discernible playing style. The whole thing feels like an unravelling mess.

Yet, remarkably, off the field, it could be argued things are even worse. Relationships are breaking down, tensions are becoming frayed, and key questions regarding Sunderland’s future direction remain unanswered. Having presided over a relatively happy camp for the best part of a year, Donald and Methven increasingly find their stewardship of the club called into question.

Last month’s announcement that the US-based FFP Sunderland group had invested a sum that is understood to be around £10m into the Black Cats was, on the face of it, a positive development. It swelled the coffers to enable investment in the academy and recruitment set-up and fund infrastructural improvements at the Stadium of Light, and also dangled the carrot of a full-blown takeover at some stage in the future.

But as time has passed, and precious little in the way of fresh clarity has emerged, questions have been levelled. Why did the US investors, with a billion-dollar fund at their disposal, back away from a full takeover? Just how badly did the current owners, who have always maintained they are perfectly capable of bankrolling things in League One, need the new funds? Given that documents lodged at Companies House by FFP have shown that a charge has been secured against a list of properties including the Stadium of Light and Academy of Light, are those assets at risk if Sunderland spend the next two or three seasons in the third tier and the current owners are unable to repay what increasingly looks like a relatively straightforward loan rather than a more strategic form of investment?

Donald has previously fronted up to answer such questions, but having grown tired of what he perceives to be an unfair level of criticism and abuse, Sunderland’s owner has removed himself from social media and cancelled planned appearances on podcasts and at talk-ins.

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Methven, to his credit, has appeared in public, but his comments have done little to assuage the growing frustration. It seems a long time ago now that the current owners were being lauded for their success in rebuilding the relationship between the club and its fans, repainting seats, embracing an open dialogue, drinking in the sun in the newly-opened Stadium of Light fan-zone.

That is not to say the fans are in open revolt. Having pilloried the likes of Ellis Short, Martin Bain, David Moyes and Simon Grayson in the recent past, there is a sense that they are running out of targets. Yet there is growing unease at the current regime’s inability to right a sinking ship, with anger threatening to mix with apathy to produce an especially toxic combination.

Things are bad at the moment, but as the last few months have proved, that is not to say they cannot get worse.