What Kristjaan Speakman said ahead of Sunderland's transfer deadline

Sunderland made their first transfer breakthrough this week with the arrival of Leeds United defender Leo Hjelde who signed a four-and-a-half-year contract with the club. The 20-year-old provides cover on the left side of defence for Michael Beale's side following a number of injuries to players in that area of the field.

Sunderland have been heavily linked with a move for former Tottenham Hotspur winger Romaine Mundle, with reports suggesting the 20-year-old has undergone a medical on Wearside ahead of a proposed move.

But that still leaves work to do for Sunderland on deadline day with central midfield and up front still key priorities to try and resolve. 

Sunderland have been linked with a move for Bournemouth striker Kieffer Moore throughout the window but continue to face competition for his signature should he be allowed to leave the Vitality Stadium before the window shuts. Then there is the ongoing link with Manchester United's Amad Diallo and a potential return to the Stadium of Light for the Ivorian. Amad enjoyed a stellar campaign with Sunderland last season when on loan from Old Trafford and has been linked with a move back to the North East for the second half of this season for several weeks.

But what can Sunderland expect? Sporting director Speakman shared his views recently on the final few days of the transfer window and this is what he had to say:

Is there a need to bring experience in – perhaps a change in policy?

I don’t think so. I think everyone will articulate what they feel we need and will package that up in different wording. For us, we’re looking for good players to improve the group, we’re looking for good players to come in and enhance the group and good players to go in the team and be in the squad. So I don’t think it’s any different.

I get the question on young players, but we’ve re-signed [Luke] O’Nien, we’ve signed a [Danny] Batth, we’ve signed a [Alex] Pritchard, we’ve signed a [Corry] Evans. I don’t quite understand the narrative, if I’m being honest. But we want to get balance and we’ll keep trying to find good players that give us balance.

What areas are you targeting?

We’ve definitely got a couple of priority positions and we’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of focus on them. We’re always looking across the squad, which you have to do in the window for both who can come and complement the team and be in the squad and players who can come in and complement what we’re trying to do as a football club.

Where are we on it? I think everyone recognises the market is quite slow at the minute, you’re seeing a really small number of transactions – especially in the Championship. We’ve got a couple of permanent offers on the table out there, a couple of loan offers out there on the table and we’re literally waiting on clubs to get back to us and that’s the slightly frustrating thing but you’ve also got to be respectful to the fact that if players are registered at clubs it’s on them to come back and determine whether they want to loan or let them go on a permanent – it’s not all in our control. That doesn’t make it a financial issue, it just makes it a timing issue and a squad management issue for that club.

And what of the finance situation?

We’re not going to be in the parachute payment club category. But we’ve shown over the last two years that you can outperform teams and it’s not necessarily about money, it’s about how you spend the money and what you do with the money and where you spend it.

We don’t feel any issue with that and there’s nothing financial stopping us doing anything at the minute. It’s more down to the market needs to free up, players need to be available and that’s where we sit.

Is midfield another area you’re looking at given the minutes demanded of those currently in that position on a regular basis?

We’re looking at all areas. I don’t subscribe to the needing a rest conversation. We’re playing one game a week, we’ve got some professional athletes, they’re all capable of delivering on that. Whether players perform well or don’t perform well in certain games, that’s going to happen. You could argue it could happen more often when you’ve got a young group and you’re trying to build that in-game experience. But we’re really happy with the three we’ve got in the middle of the pitch at the minute.

We’ve got other players who can play in the middle of the pitch and ultimately it’s up to the coach to pick what he feels is the right team.

An experienced striker is the one most people are talking about?

We’re handicapped by availability in the market. If you looked at the players we’ve enquired about and put offers in for, we’d be one of six to eight clubs for that exact same player. So it just shows a little bit of where it is. That’s where that position is at the minute.

Sometimes you go though these periods where there’s areas of the pitch where there are more players that are maybe surplus if you like in certain positions in certain windows and we’ve just found over the last couple of windows for that position to be a real difficult point. But we’d be no different to a lot of other football clubs.

Jack Clarke – will he stay?

Look, I get the nervousness around selling players, I really do, because there’s players there who we all love, both internally and externally. But our ambition is to retain our best players. Our ambition is to keep developing and evolving the group, keep performing, try to perform even better, try to get a higher place in the league. So, from that position, I don’t see any of those external movements happening so it’s business as usual from our perspective. 

I can never sit and say a player is never going to leave because if Real Madrid phoned up and say there’s a lot of commas around these zeros then everyone would have to consider it. I think we’ve got to try and ensure the fans that the ownership have got the best intentions around trying to build a team we can keep improving and that if the method behind it was to sell, we’d have already sold loads of players. We’ve had loads of opportunities to sell talent. I’d like people to take comfort in the fact that hasn’t happened on too many occasions.

Are you confident the four strikers signed in the summer will develop and become a success?

We’ve got a lot of belief in the players in the group and we’ve just got to get clarity and maybe we haven’t been good enough with that clarity around what our expectation of the players is.

We signed someone a year ago and a lot of the feedback on some of the fans forums we went to was that he’s not done well enough but we actually signed that particular player to be a back-up player and the comparison is that he didn’t play enough games. Internally we actually thought he played more games. So it’s just around the fact we’ve got to understand where they are in their journey, what the expectation is at this moment in time for them and where they need to get to.

I do understand we live in a world where everyone wants everything instantly and that’s obviously a much easier outcome for everyone if players turn up, integrate immediately and perform. We had young Amad who came and I don’t think anyone would say when Amad came he was in the team on day one and this kid is going to be a superstar for Sunderland. It took a little bit of time for him to adapt. Ross Stewart, I think people would say it was probably six months into his journey here and that’s just people. Players are not robots. You cannot take a human and move them and expect them to perform exactly the same in a different environment. It’s on us to try and create the environment and it’s on them to try and step up and deliver in that environment.

I’ve got faith the boys can keep getting better. Ultimately, what level they can get to will be determined by all those factors, won’t it? We tried to do the best we can with the information we’ve got to make the best judgements and selections.

What about Amad? Could he come back to Sunderland?

In the transfer window there’s loads of things that are never going to happen that happen and loads of things that are going to happen don’t happen. That’s just the market that we live in.

The situation with Amad is really, really clear. We’ve got a real positive relationship with the boy and his people, we’ve got a really positive relationship with Man United and I think everyone was really delighted on all sides what happened last season. Do we think he’s a player we think can come in and improve our team? Yes. Have we enquired about him? Yes. Have we kept in contact? Of course we have. I think if we hadn’t of kept in contact my head might be on a stake. But that’s because we value him as well.

If that picture changes at all, hopefully we’ll be on it. We understand where it sits but that doesn't mean, even if he became available, we’d get him because as I’ve said on numerous occasions I think he’s a tier one player, so he’s going to play in one of the top league’s somewhere.

Are you expecting the final days of the window to be busy?

It will be busy, I expect it to be busy. Do I expect us to get the outcomes that we want? Hopefully. I’m always optimistic because we’ve got really good people behind the scenes and I think we work in a really collaborative way across the recruitment, the coaching and ownership level. We’ve always shown that we can get some really, really good deals for Sunderland and we can progress.

Do I have anxiety about it? Of course I do because there are so many things that are outside of your control and we’d all like everything to be in our control but, ultimately, they’re not. All I can do is put us in the best place to get the players we want and to try and keep improving what we’re doing.

How do you balance the panic among supporters to sign a player they feel the club needs and not doing that in house?

We never panic in house. You can’t do this type of work if you’re going to panic and you’ve got to be really strategic, really aligned in how we work it and you have to be calm in those moments because that’s where mistakes happen.

If you start becoming frantic and disconnected you’re going to start making some poor selections and some poor economic selections and that’s where you get the damage moving forward - I could give you some examples of where that’s been done poorly, but I won’t. But that’s ultimately the difficulty of the job, isn’t it? To stay calm in those moments and to try and make the right decisions.

Sometimes those tough decisions are saying no to things that, externally, people might perceive to be good but, internally, we know they’re not going to be good and they’re not going to work and that’s the difficult thing because naturally we want supporters to be proud about what’s going on. We want them to be excited by the transfer window and new players and the squad evolving. We can’t do that at the expense of actually getting better, if that makes sense. So we’ll see how we go over the next few days.

Are there any players you won’t take phone calls on?

You’ve got to appreciate that they’re not robots. The way the world goes now is that players are often aware of what goes on. The players has got to be buoyed. If you’re retaining a player and the player feels like they can’t deliver then there’s no benefit, is there?

There’s a balance there because what you don’t want, which you sometimes see at clubs, where such-and-such is refusing to train. It goes on a lot less nowadays but ultimately you need a happy player and you need them to understand what we’re trying to do. There’s plenty of occasions we will have said and we will say in the future where we’re not going  to make a sale but you’ve got to be really joined up in what the process looks like moving forward. That’s about having a harmonious team and a harmonious football club and everyone understanding what they’re doing.

How do you want Sunderland to look, going forward?

It’s not what I want it to be. I bought into a group of people from Kyril all the way across a leadership team and staff that believes Sunderland should be a certain type of football club and we’re trying to develop that identity because that’s really important because otherwise how do you know what you’re coming to watch and how can you recruit to it? 

The opposition is always trying to stop you so you don’t have it all your own way and we’ve experienced that in the League One days and in some Championship games where teams are coming and clearly not trying to be too proactive. That’s an evolving piece. We’ve got players that can deliver that attractive football and we’ve got to keep trying players who can add to it.