Tony Mowbray: 'This Sunderland team want to play a bold brand of football'

There are two words on the Sunderland badge that, for far too long, have been overlooked. Consectatio Excellentiae. Or, to put it in English, ‘in pursuit of excellence.’

The words are the club motto, or so they were supposed to be. Certainly, it felt like they were back when the new badge was launched in 1997 to coincide with the opening of the Stadium of Light.

For those first few years, the club made giant strides almost year on year. The ground was excellent, the football was excellent, the atmosphere was excellent. Everything was. Peter Reid always said back then that if you stand still in football, you go backwards. The club found out the hard way that he was right.

And so, at some point, excellence stopped being pursued. Those words on the badge became a relic of a distance past… a mere whisper of a long lost idea, scrawled in plain sight yet unrelatable to everything around it.

It was a slow descent. Excellence turned to good, good turned to mediocrity, and mediocrity turned to survival.

By the time Sunderland had hit League One, all they really pursued was dumb luck, because until Kyril Louis-Dreyfus turned up with his trust fund and acute understanding of football having been essentially raised within Olympique Marseille, dumb luck was the only thing that was ever going to get the club out of that god-forsaken hell hole.

Indeed, yesterday was the anniversary of the 6-0 thrashing at Bolton that, somehow, proved a pivotal positive turning point in the club’s modern history.

If anyone would have told me that day that just one year later, a brilliantly fun and fearless young Sunderland team would be pursuing excellence with such relentless rigour that that they were standing tall against Premier League opposition and taking the game to them on their own patch, I’d have probably questioned their marbles.

That, though, was what we got. And do you want to know what the best thing was about it? It wasn’t the slick quality football or the effervescent energy levels. It wasn’t the quality on the ball, or the steely resolve in defence. It wasn’t even the mental toughness to keep going after conceding the equaliser.

No, the best thing about it was not none of it – not one single bit – surprised any of us. That was our team, our Sunderland. It was recognisable, not by the red and white stripes on their bodies but the pursuit of excellence in their spirit.

“It’s a new generation,” Tony Mowbray, perhaps one of the most unlikely heroes in Sunderland history, said of his team after the game. “The direction I give them is to be brave and it fits in with what the club motto is.

“They want the coach to play a bold brand of football — not to be afraid, play 5-4-1 and sit off all game. Let’s go and take them on and we did that for long spells.

“I’m very conscious to try and dampen the expectations of this team — they are a team of boys learning to play in a man’s world.”

There is a long way to go and this squad of boys have an awful lot to learn. There is, in all honesty, much we don’t know about them. The future is as uncertain as ever.

One thing we can say with absolute certainty, though, is that excellence is once again being pursued by Sunderland.

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