IT was ten years ago last month when England manager Gareth Southgate was sacked by Middlesbrough, with the team sitting just a point off top spot in fourth and looking to seal an immediate return to the Premier League.

It was during that year’s summer, following relegation from the top-flight, that Southgate moved to promote Nick Allamby as the club’s head of sports science as part of a holistic approach, having been quick to recognise his potential after becoming a key member of the backroom team.

The sacking of Southgate, replaced by a contrasting type of manager in Gordon Strachan, meant Allamby never got to find out whether his own methods in trying to get the best out of Middlesbrough’s players would end in promotion. Having agreed to take on a similar role now at Sunderland, he is hoping for a much more suitable outcome.

Phil Parkinson, the Black Cats manager who has already found that Sunderland will not find it easy to win every game in League One, clearly trusts Allamby’s work. After inheriting him as Bradford City manager, Allamby helped to lead the Bantams to the League Cup final in 2013 as well as promotion to League One.

Parkinson then took Allamby to Bolton with him where they celebrated another promotion to the Championship, so clearly there is an understanding and a trust the pair – as well as with assistant manager Steve Parkin and goalkeeper coach Lee Butler – has a history of working successfully together.

“What Phil does is he allows things to be a much more holistic regime, if you like,” said Allamby, speaking at the Academy of Light this week. “It comes down to what you do on the training field and unfortunately he’s not had much time to do that.

“That’s part of this league, I suppose, when you’re Saturday-Tuesday, Saturday-Tuesday. But that’s part of how I help support them. It’s not just about play, recover, are there certain other things we can do?

“It’s just making sure that the balance between training and recovery is right. Then you have to make sure the players buy into what you want to do. It’s a 24-hour job for the players.”

Allamby is now responsible for ensuring Sunderland’s players know how to live their lives so that they are in the perfect shape when they head out on to a pitch to compete in League One.

He said: “I work with the players every day, in the old days it might have been head of sport science, now it’s more all-encompassing than that. It’s just everything that affects how a person or a player will perform on a Saturday comes under my remit.

“That could be such things as travel arrangement, which is even more important at a club like this where everything tends to be further away, getting all the details right.

“Supporting the coaches, what the players do over the course of a week so they can be ready for a Saturday over the course of what is a long season. It’s a highly demanding league and it’s my job to help with that.

“Everything they do, both on and off the field, has a bearing on what happens on a Saturday. It’s my role to help the coaches to understand how that is, they might look at things from a football angle and I might be able to bring another couple of angles on that.”

Allamby has only been at Sunderland for a few weeks, so it would be harsh to expect his demands to have been met already. That said, though, he is determined to move quickly in a bid to ensure the playing staff can start to deliver better results.

He said: “I haven’t had a chance to fully ascertain where these lads are in terms of whether they can physically do it, but I know quite a few of these players in terms of having been around this league and the one above in the last few years, so there is definitely a core of players that can do that. But it comes down to that, the manager demands that they have to cover certain physical parameters in a game to make what he wants to do achievable.

“The manager is a big believer in what we do, that’s the basis of it. You can have all the support staff you want, but if the manager doesn’t believe in what you do then you cannot do your job."

Throughout his career, since leaving Middlesbrough where he was originally a masseur, he has maintained his living base in Marske, North Yorkshire. The shorter trip up the A19 to Sunderland is much easier than heading over to Bolton every day.

In fact, bearing in mind how Bolton’s financial plight meant the majority of staff were not paid for six months last season, everything suddenly seems easier at Sunderland – it’s just about delivering the results to get the promotion challenge done.

“It was the most demanding year I’ve had. But like any challenging situation, it teaches you lessons,” he said. “You have to be professional, get round these problems and the main one is, how do you get the players to work when they’re not getting paid?

“Credit to the players there because you’re relying on their professionalism, and I always thought that if I let my standards drop, then it’s not a good example to them.

“You say, ‘I’m not getting paid either, we have two choices, rap it in or carry on. I want to carry on, do you?’ Every hardship teaches you lessons and this is rightly a very demanding club (Sunderland).

“But not as demanding as going to work for four months with no money, it gets to the point where you’re thinking, I’ve got a big family and have always stayed in this area (North-East), and you’re thinking, ‘how am I going to fill that car up again?’

“We had three years there and the first two there were brilliant. Even though the first year in the Championship was a struggle, we didn’t really have the squad to cope but we found a way to stay up. The third year was a nightmare." His smile is back at Sunderland, and he wants that to stay.