If what Sunderland are trying to do was easy, everyone would be doing it

‘If it was easy, everyone would have it.’ If you’re a parent who has had to deal with a child pursuing success but struggling, I suspect you’ve said those words plenty of times before. Right now, it feels they apply to Sunderland too.

In many ways, the defeat to Cardiff was when the lofty dreams of Sunderland’s future and the harsh realities of the present came crashing into each other. The lineup was a very young one and the naivety of the performance was highlighted in full by a very decent Cardiff side who are hardened to life in the Championship.

Without Corry Evans and Alex Pritchard, who Tony Mowbray later explained were rested due to fears of them breaking down with fatigue, it was down to the youngsters to try to carve out a result at the Stadium of Light.

"Less fatigue, more an injury caused by fatigue," Mowbray said while explaining the decision to bench Evans and Pritchard. "We do wellness things and every day players get gauged on where they are, how they feel, what levels of fatigue they've got - red, amber, and green.

"We've got a lot of players who are in danger of breaking down. That's what the science tells us.”

Seven of the 11 players to start the game were aged 22 or younger. To put that into context, the team that started for Sunderland would have been eligible to play an under-23s fixture in the Premier League 2.

As the game unfolded and the frustration set in, I was as critical as anyone else. Evans and Pritchard were sitting on the bench while the youngsters were visibly struggling without them. Things predictably improved after they were brought on, and that only fuelled the frustration further.

That felt like a game that Sunderland could have won. It wasn’t the not winning that was the source of the frustration, though, it was the sense that Sunderland didn’t throw their best at it. Their best, certainly in terms of the vital central midfield area, were sat on the bench for most of the game.

However, it’s clear that frustration is something that we are all going to have to learn to live with and accept for at least the short term, and do so in full knowledge that there are no guaranteed pay-offs for it in the long term either. That is simply the path, and gamble, Sunderland have chosen to take.

We all know the model. Sunderland are going to be buying young players. In fact, Sunderland are only going to be buying young players. Aiden McGeady gave an insight into the workings of the club as he discussed his departure from the club last summer.

“I couldn't really see myself staying with the way Sunderland is being run at the minute anyway,” McGeady said. “They are very much focused on bringing in young players and developing them with high-asset value and I don't really tick that box.”

Alex Neil said the same before leaving to join Stoke: “The majority of our transfer fees, in fact pretty much all of them, will be spent on younger players. They won’t be spent on guys that are older. It really is as straight forward as that.”

That has proven to be the case, too. Every single one of Sunderland’s experienced players - Danny Batth, Alex Pritchard, Corry Evans and Bailey Wright – arrived on free transfers. Indeed, even when Sunderland suffered a striker crisis Tony Mowbray ruled out a short-term free agent signing because they don’t want the opportunities of young players blocked. That policy is not going to change.

That’s a good thing, too. Granted, the current recruitment model at Sunderland is not to everyone’s taste, but it’s certainly one that you have to commit to. The investments in the young players have already been made and the money already spent. Now it’s about seeing it through.

There are plenty of potential benefits to seeing it through, too. In truth, the way that modern football is, until some multi-billionaire with an open chequebook and, probably, some human rights atrocities to sportswash away, comes along, the current model is the one that offers Sunderland their highest possible ceiling.

You only need to look at clubs like Brighton, Leicester and Brentford to see what can be achieved by trusting in young talent and backing yourself to develop it. Buying your way into the top ten of the Premier League is going to be astronomically expensive, and without the conveyor belt of emerging talent beneath the star players it is only going to be a matter of time before the top clubs asset-strip you anyway.

The downside, of course, are days like the one we just had against Cardiff. It’s enduring the ‘learning curve’ matches that will ultimately be the making of the players the club believe can eventually drive the club forward both on the pitch and on the balance sheet.

Terms like ‘the process’ and ‘the project’ can turn your stomach as a football fan, and they offer no consolation at all when you lose games, particularly in the manner in which Sunderland did to Cardiff. They are, though, the reality for us right now whether we like the terms or not.

Hopefully, we are looking back in five years’ time as a re-established Premier League club saying it was all worth it and the club got it right. Hopefully in 15 years’ time things are even better than that and we are talking about the current days as the most crucial and transformative in the club’s modern history.

For now, though, it feels like we have little choice but to accept the kind of performance we saw against Cardiff – probably more often than we’d like – as just part and parcel of what the club are trying to achieve. Fact is, while there are no guarantees we are going to achieve what we want even with weekends like this, we are definitely not going to achieve it without them.

And, after all, if the success Sunderland are attempting to build for themselves was easy, everyone would have it.