How did Sunderland manage to sign Noah Sadiki?
Noah Sadiki continues to shine for Sunderland this season
I’m starting to lose count now. In the past week, and the past week alone, Martin O’Neill, Martin Keown, Clinton Morrison, Alan Shearer, Troy Deeney, Charlie Austin, Jason McAteer, Glenn Murray, Paul Merson, and Ashley Williams have all lavished praise on Sunderland captain Granit Xhaka. There will be other besides, but trying to remember them all is like trying to memorise the phone book by heart.
This, of course, is a good thing; Sunderland have signed a wily, battle-hardened midfield general against all accepted wisdoms and understandings of the footballing food chain, and are now being rewarded for their pluck and moxy with a series of individual performances that are emblematic of a growing consensus that they are maybe, probably, hopefully too good to get relegated.
But while Xhaka continues to bask in the acclaim of a commentariat who you suspect are still in the process of learning the names of several of his teammates, there is a man alongside him - the Robin to his Batman, if you will; the Garfunkel to his Simon - who is perhaps equally as deserving of a good ol’ fashioned eulogising.
On Saturday afternoon, against a Chelsea side boasting a midfield duo worth some £222 million, it was Noah Sadiki - the grinning, boyish upstart with his work rate like an E number-fuelled Duracell bunny and his comparatively thrifty price tag - who simultaneously stole and ran the show.
At the beginning of the campaign, when hope was still quite novel and such assertions had to be tentative for the sake of placating fate, there were a brave few on Wearside who dared to point out that the 20-year-old - low to the ground, ceaselessly vigorous, and seemingly omnipresent - reminded them of a young N’Golo Kante. Having watched him buzz about the engine room at Stamford Bridge, you can only assume that there several locals out on the terraces who thought they were seeing a ghost.
The lad simply does not stop. He’s like a Roomba that’s been modified to run on rods of reactor-grade plutonium. One must imagine that the reason we have barely seen hide nor hair of Dan Neil in recent weeks is because Regis Le Bris has got him hooked up to a treadmill somewhere deep within the bowels of the Academy of Light undergoing an intensive course of ultramarathon training in preparation for the dreaded day that Sadiki jets off to the African Cup of Nations. Then again, it wouldn’t necessarily surprise anyone if it turned out the DR Congo international wasn’t actually flying to Morocco, but running there instead - y’know, just for a light warm-up.
Only the aforementioned Xhaka has covered more ground in the Premier League than Sadiki so far this season, but that being said, it would also be unjust to give the impression that the midfielder is nothing more than an enviable pair of lungs with a Strava subscription. Against Chelsea, for instance, he recorded a 95% pass completion rate, as well as winning 65% of his duels and making five interceptions. He was, in other words, metronomic and combative, neat and hypervigilant. At times, it felt as if the Black Cats had two, or maybe even three, Noah Sadikis out on the pitch. It takes something quite special to eclipse the likes of Moises Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez these days, and yet, at various points in the contest, the Sunderland man did exactly that.
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But, of course, you know this. You watched Sadiki over the weekend, as you have done for the past handful of months. You are, by now, well-versed in his indefatigable charms and his utter commitment to the cause. You know, like most Mackems do, that while it is Xhaka who is garnering the vast majority of adulation - and justifiably so, mind you - it is really his unassuming apprentice who has been the unexpected unsung hero of Le Bris’ midfield renovation.
And as such, you must feel, like I do, that the longer Sadiki continues to be overlooked by the talking heads and the studio guests, the better. Let Sunderland eek as much out of their £17 million secret as they possibly can, because mark my words, from what we have seen so far, he could go all the way to the top of the professional game. Quite how he ended up on Wearside, I don’t know, but while he’s here, we’d best enjoy his work.
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