TONY MOWBRAY was always confident he would be managing Dan Neil this season – because he had lined up a potential move for the Sunderland midfielder while he was still manager of Blackburn Rovers.

Neil will be part of the Sunderland side that returns to action at Reading tomorrow night looking to bounce back from last week’s Tees-Wear derby defeat to Middlesbrough.

The 20-year-old found himself out of the first team towards the end of last season, but forced his way back into the starting side under Alex Neil at the start of this term and has retained his place under Mowbray.

The Sunderland boss is a long-term admirer of the Wearsider, to the extent that he would have been making a move in the transfer market had he remained in his previous position as Blackburn boss and the Black Cats not won promotion out of League One.

“Dan’s career is on an upward trajectory, he’s a very talented boy,” said Mowbray. “I sit here now, and as Blackburn Rovers manager last year, he was very much on our radar. If Sunderland weren’t going to get promoted, we would have been trying take him out of League One.

“Here I am now working with him every day, and I see the player I watched and thought he was. His passing range is very good and he can run all day.

“He’s one of the players we’re trying to get to break the box a bit more because I think he’s got a goal in him. He wants to learn and get better, and he wants to watch his clips after training.

“He wants to keep improving and, as a coach, there’s nothing better than a footballer that wants to improve and makes demands of your time to go and sit with him and talk through what you thought was good and bad.”

Like Neil, Mowbray became a first-team player with his hometown club when he forced his way into Middlesbrough’s senior side in the 1980s.

The Saltburn-born centre-half became a talismanic figure as Middlesbrough captain, and also went on to manage the club, and while he appreciates the strength of the bond that can develop between a player and his boyhood team, he also accepts that playing for your hometown club can bring its own pressures.

Having watched Neil from close quarters in the last few weeks, though, he is confident the midfielder is capable of handling whatever is thrown at him.

“The footballer has to be good enough,” he said. “It’s all very well having a homegrown player in the team, but the homegrown guy can often be the one that takes a lot of the flak if things aren’t going well. They almost become an easy target.

“Dan seems to me as if he’s got the personality to be able to override that. He’s still a young boy, and he does have spells in games where he doesn’t influence it as much as he could. Because of the talent level he’s got, he should be impacting football matches a lot more, for longer. But I think he’ll grow into that and understand it.

“You have to give them the confidence. If you talk about artists and soldiers, the soldiers should be winning the ball back and fighting and scrapping, and then the artists are the ones who pick the right pass and know when to dribble and shoot.

“Dan genuinely falls into both categories. You expect him to win second balls and put his foot in and win challenges, but then he can hit 60-yard diagonals where you think, ‘Wow, what a pass that is’.”