Millwall boss Alex Neil on ex-club Sunderland ‘in limbo’ as wait for Championship play-offs and happy memories of Stadium of Light reign

Millwall boss Alex Neil reckons that his former club Sunderland are a “bit in limbo” as he is confident their opponents on Saturday have a Championship play-off place locked down.

The Scot defeated Stoke City, another of the teams he has managed, before the international break.

Millwall are six points off the top six with eight matches remaining.

But Neil knows that Sunderland will pose a big challenge in them cutting that gap.

“They have had a great season,” the Lions head coach told the South London Press. “They have added good experience in good areas of the pitch. The two centre-backs are experienced, whether it be Dan Ballard, Luke O’Nien or Chris Mepham.

“Wilson Isidor has made a big difference in terms of giving them that goalscorer who can hit double figures in a season.

“A lot of the younger players like Jobe Bellingham, Dan Neil, Chris Rigg, Dennis Cirkin and Trai Hume have all got another year under their belt at the level. That has really set them up to have a good year.

“Their style is a little bit different to what it has been. They have been very much possession-based and trying to dominate games over the last few years whereas I’d say they are much more counter-attack and transition than what they have been.

“You can’t argue with the points they have got on the board. They are in a bit of a difficult situation in that they are probably too far away from that top two and they are never going to drop out of the play-offs.

“They are a little bit in limbo until the play-offs come along. But they want to finish the season strongly and go in with a bit of momentum.”

It is so hard for the automatic promotion places not to be contested by those clubs with Premier League parachute payments, coupled with the financial support allowing them to retain so much of their squad despite relegation.

“You just need to look at the evidence – it is clear over the last five or six seasons – that the teams which come down are always there or thereabouts even if they don’t start well,” said Neil. “They can make it up.

“The teams that have gone up over that same period have really, really struggled to stay up. It shows you the chasm at the moment between the Premier League and the Championship.

“But, equally, the teams coming down have got too much for the league.

“If you do correlations over the last decade, where your budget lands is not normally far from where you land in a season. Now you do get anomalies, for the better and worse, but predominantly if you go across a league with 24 teams, for 10 years solid, you won’t be far away from where your budget should be.”

Neil has talked before about leaving Sunderland, only months after leading them to League One promotion in May 2002.
He joined Stoke City.

“I absolutely loved it,” said Neil. “It was one of those ones where I knew it was a job I needed to go and get them up. They had been so close for four or five years.

“It was one where people said: ‘It’s a bit of a poisoned chalice – it’s a hard one and everyone has tried to do it’. But that, in itself, makes you determined to go and give it a bash, if you’re lucky enough to get the job.

“Fortunately when I met them what I wanted and what I had done in the past I felt it sort of aligned. I’d went in and taken Norwich up mid-season. I’d taken Hamilton up in my first season. At that stage I had done Preston, which was a bit different for four years and steadily built that.

“Before that I was really known for ‘try and get us up – see where we go’. It was nice to get back to that. It was a different kind of job because expectation is there.

“There was no grey area. If you’ve got us up you’ve succeeded and if you don’t you have failed. But I like working in that black and white scenario.”

Neil has spoken since about how the club were slow to look at his contractual situation after their return to the Championship.

“From my perspective it was just very non-committal,” he said. “I felt like I had just taken the team up and I felt as if I deserved a little more longevity than what I was offered at the time.”