AFTER a wait of 124 days, Sunderland AFC finally have a permanent head coach at the helm.

17 weeks and five days, or if you prefer to tell it in a a slightly wacky way, that’s roughly 2,976 hours, or 178,560 minutes.

The club has spent a third of 2024 without a permanent manager in situ, so it feels great now to be out of that state of flux.

READ MORE: Sunderland have appointed Regis Le Bris as their new head coach

Not that the club paid any attention to me, but I said in this column a week ago that it was imperative that Sunderland were in a position to make an appointment ahead of the players returning for pre-season.

We’ve heard a lot about certain players who have been unsettled by the situation – Chris Rigg is one that was reportedly holding off making a decision regarding his future until the managerial issue was resolved. So, now that it is, ideally those players will commit their immediate futures to the club.

After what feels like an eternity being quite downbeat about the club since our quite remarkable downturn in form in the second half of the season, the appointment of Regis Le Bris allows us to get a little bit excited about the upcoming season.

There’s been quite a bit of noise over the last few weeks around what the average Sunderland fan would want, or expect, from their club. And that for some, challenging for the Premier League was unrealistic. That some fans were expecting too much of a club that, remember, was in League One just two years ago.

There’s no time to be resting on the laurels earned by winning the League One play-offs in 2022. We used that momentum, impressed many in the Championship and made the play-offs a year ago. And while we missed out, we should have been maintaining that in 2023-24.

Instead, the club stood still, and in football, if you stand still, you go backwards. And while we sit here and mope about it – and there’s been plenty of time for that, there go Ipswich Town in the outside lane without a sidewards glance with back-to-back promotions. They did it, why couldn’t we? Were we expecting too much?

We should have the reputation of a supporter base that is difficult to please. We shouldn’t deny that. We should own it. It shows that we have high standards, and those high standards should be the driving force for the club’s owners.

They match that in words, but we’re still yet to see that in actions.

The club’s motto is In Pursuit of Excellence – with the word ‘pursuit’ doing a lot of heavy lifting in recent seasons.

As a result of last season’s performance, there’s a little pressure now on Le Bris to hit the ground running, as unfair as it may seem. Some fans will afford him a season to bed in, but there’s a good chunk of the fanbase that are perhaps tired of giving manager after manager lots of time.

He needs to be backed by the club with some major investment in the playing squad. And while there’ll be plenty of talk about departures – Jack Clarke and Anthony Patterson still dominate the rumour mill – there’s a hell of a lot of incomings needed in order to become a genuine challenger for promotion.

A replacement for Corry Evans in the heart of midfield and a proven striker to lead the line is of the utmost importance, and now the club has concluded its managerial search, that has to be the priority.

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There’s plenty to be excited about over the next few weeks. The players returning to training, pre-season fixtures being locked in, the Championship fixture list being announced, and, at the end of this week, our new hummel home kit will be released.

The Danish brand released the range of training gear at the back end of last week.

Now we have a head coach to wear it, we can finally begin to look forward.