After Tony Mowb
Sunderland announced on Monday night that Tony Mowbray had departed the club, with Mike Dodds taking interim charge as the team prepares for challenging home games against West Brom and Leeds United.
While it remains possible that the process to appoint a new head coach will be concluded by that stage, as it stands Dodds will be in charge for those games. He will be supported by the club’s remaining senior coaching staff, which includes fellow first-team coach and former Sunderland striker Michael Proctor as well as goalkeeping coach Alessandro Barcherini. All three are ‘club appointments’, designed to help link the way the first team operates with the rest of the club regardless of who is head coach at the time. All are likely to stay on following the appointment of a new head coach as a result. U21 boss Graeme Murty also has significant experience in senior football, and so could be called upon this week in some capacity.
ray left Sunderland, first-team coach Mike Dodds took over as interim manager.
Dodds will take charge in the interim, having developed an increasingly influential role is the first-team set up since his arrival from Birmingham City. Dodds worked closely with sporting director Kristjaan Speakman during their time in the Birmingham academy, and had initially been widely expected to follow him to Sunderland. Instead, Dodds opted to stay and replace Speakman as Academy manager at St Andrews, which was widely seen as a big coup for the club whose academy status was the subject of fierce speculation at the time.
