Jones stepped down from his role on the board ahead of the club’s return to the Premier League
David Jones watched on at Wembley and as Harrison Burrows found the bottom corner, the agony was twofold.
The Sky Sports presenter has been a Sunderland fan since boyhood and like everyone else, sensed the game slipping away from his team. But Jones also watched on with the nervousness of a director, understanding what defeat might mean for the club in the weeks and months that followed.
Jones joined the Sunderland board as a non-executive in December 2019 at one of the club’s very lowest ebbs, navigating the myriad of highs and undoubted lows that followed. So to say that what followed, from the VAR intervention to Tommy Watson’s late strike, was agony to ecstasy would be an understatement. For Jones, it was also the end of a journey.
“I think at that point in the game, that would have been a long way back for us,” Jones tells The Echo.
“And there was a part of me that was sitting there thinking I'm not sure I like what I think is going to happen next season in terms of where it might leave us as a football club, because we would probably have had to work our budgets accordingly and there wouldn't have been a huge transfer spend that summer.
“We actually might have found it quite difficult to keep some of our best players, so to go from that during the course of the game through to the elation of the way that we won the match… ultimately my first feeling was a huge sense of pride that I've been part of this journey.
“Then just absolute delight and wonder for the fans having been through the lowest of lows, going through all that to being back in the Premier League where they wanted to be. Then for all of us speaking [at the club] about the fact this is what we wanted to do, this is our journey, this is our plan, this is our aim, we have to get the football club back to the Premier League. So all of that kind of coming to fruition was just this incredible moment of elation and then there was a realisation on my part as well from a very selfish perspective that I knew with the full-time whistle that that was probably me done [on the board]. I just probably wasn’t quite ready to make that decision yet.”
Jones would eventually step down in August, weeks ahead of the Premier League campaign. He smiles wryly when it’s put to him that it might have been difficult had Sunderland struggled this season, to stand by the Monday Night Football screen while Jamie Carragher picked apart Régis Le Bris’s structure.
“I can't lie, that was probably part of my thinking," Jones explains.
"I've been as surprised by anybody with the progress that the team has made and with the brilliant start that they made which continues on right to this point. I thought it was better just to have that degree of separation so I could speak freely without fear or compromise really.
“Also if I think back to some of the duties that I had, some of the responsibilities that I took on in those early months and years, it is ludicrous to think that I could still be doing that in the Premier League, it would just be wrong for a Premier League football club. They need professional people, they need people who know how to operate on a European scale, never mind just on a UK scale.”
Promotion wasn’t quite the end of his story at the club, though.
A close observer of the Premier League, he offered advice on what was coming on from Sunderland and then watched on with as much pleasant surprise as every fan as Kyril Louis-Dreyfus pushed the boat out.
Jones explains: “What I was able to do and what I was pleased to be able to do in the final few weeks and months was just to counsel on, with the manager in place, counsel on what I think we had to expect going into the Premier League and what the club had to be ready for and I'm really pleased to see that sort of taken on board and this team that came together in the summer that was full of experience for one, full of physicality and know-how and without that I think it would have been a very different story this season.
“The next few days and weeks after Wembley were absolutely critical because we were starting from so far back in relation to Burnley and Leeds,” Jones adds.
“I have to credit Kyril really for just being so open-minded and so driven at that point. It did feel like a huge hurdle particularly coming from our position as play-off winners but he was adamant that it could be achieved if we did certain things. I have to say I sort of took a step back at that point and thought well if you're able to do what you're saying, then this is going to be a really exciting summer but I still didn't quite believe that the club had the capability to do what it did. To spend with the force that it did and not just in terms of the the size of the the transfers but obviously the wage bill which went from, I suppose it would have been top half in the championship but it wouldn't have been top two or three to then going into that position of orbit compared to where we have been.”
Watching Sunderland’s progress this season has therefore been a sense of pride for Jones this season, who admits to struggling to get his words out on Sky Sports in the aftermath of that Tyne-Wear derby comeback. There is some sadness, too, that so many of the players and figures who were part of the journey back to the top tier have now moved on.
Having witnessed first-hand the rollercoaster that was Sunderland’s journey back to the top, however, the current feeling is excitement and what is still to come this season.
“I’m still hopeful that this can be a really exciting end to the season,” he says.
“Looking up into the top half rather than down because there’s so much football to be played. Wouldn’t it just be incredible if this turned into a European campaign? It’s not beyond the realms of possibility.”
You couldn’t sum up how far Sunderland have travelled since 2019 any better.
Catch more from our chat with Dave Jones in next week’s Sunderland Echo, or watch the conversation in full over on the Sunderland Echo SAFC YouTube page.
Continue Reading