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David Moyes
David Moyes saw his team sink to the bottom of the Premier League after their 4-0 home defeat by Southampton. Photograph: Alex Livesey/Getty Images
David Moyes saw his team sink to the bottom of the Premier League after their 4-0 home defeat by Southampton. Photograph: Alex Livesey/Getty Images

Sunderland and David Moyes skating on thin ice with or without New York break

This article is more than 7 years old
Manager’s logic questioned as he takes his rock-bottom side to America’s freezing east coast and suggests it will make their home city ‘feel like Dubai’

How are you rewarded for failing at work? The question is pertinent in the week David Moyes took his Sunderland squad to New York for a mid-season break – yes, the same Sunderland whose 4-0 thumping by Southampton at the Stadium of Light on Saturday left them rooted to the bottom of the Premier League. Bad at football but now off for a bit of sightseeing in one of the world’s most iconic cities, which may well include a visit to Trump Tower. Make America Great Again? Moyes could do with making his team adequate for a few weeks.

In fairness to the Scot, that is the principal reason behind the trip. The players will be put through regular training sessions while in New York, which will include runs through Central Park, and the manager hopes the sub‑zero conditions and heavy snow the city experienced last week will also provide Sunderland’s beleaguered troops with a mental boost on their return to the north-east.

As Moyes said: “The big thing for me is to create a team spirit so they look after each other on the pitch – and the psychology behind going somewhere so cold is that when we come back we’ll think Sunderland is Dubai.”

It is an interesting strategy and the first indication of how successful it has been will come when Sunderland travel to Moyes’s former club, Everton, for their next league fixture on 25 February. Win or draw and all the travelling and expense will feel worthwhile – lose again and questions, not for the first time this season, will be asked about Moyes’s judgment.

“I’ve done New York before [with Everton] and it works,” Moyes has said and it is worth noting he is not the first manager to use a free weekend created by an absence from the FA Cup to rejuvenate his players abroad. Indeed Jürgen Klopp, Slaven Bilic, Mark Hughes and Ronald Koeman are among the others doing the same this week, with Koeman also someone who feels there is something to gain from heading for cold climates.

In March 2015 Koeman, then in charge at Southampton, used an early FA Cup exit to “treat” his squad to a skiing weekend in Switzerland. The players also got involved in an ice hockey match and, although the photographs and video that emerged show Graziano Pellè, Morgan Schneiderlin and James Ward-Prowse having a good time – bonding as Koeman intended – the clips of them slipping and sliding, particularly on the ice, are wince-inducing.

Southampton included a message with one clip that read: “No footballers were hurt during the making of this video,” but the fact they were put in that position with two months of the season to go seemed pretty reckless on the part of the manager. In reply Koeman would no doubt point to his team’s immediate results following the trip – a 1-1 draw at Chelsea, who would go on to become champions, followed by two wins in their next three games.

However, after that there was something of a slump, with Southampton winning only one of their last six matches of the campaign. So maybe all that coming together in the cold was not worth it after all.

It had something of the desired effect for Martin Schmidt when he took his Mainz squad to the Swiss mountains in January 2016 during that season’s Bundesliga winter break. Players such as Danny Latza, Gonzalo Jara and Pierre Bengtsson were forced to brave temperatures as low as -11C while sleeping in tents in the Canton of Valais – a no doubt gruelling experience but one that was followed by Mainz finishing sixth in Germany’s top flight, having been eighth before departure.

The tradition, of course, is for teams to head for the sun at this time of the year and that is what Liverpool are doing on the back of their 2-0 victory against Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday. Klopp and his players flew to the La Manga resort on the south-east coast of Spain for a five-day break, which the manager hopes will double as a “pre-season for the rest of the season”, providing his troops with a boost as they look to secure a top-four finish.

There will not be any slipping on ice or threat of frostbite for Jordan Henderson, Sadio Mané, Philippe Coutinho et al in an area where temperatures are not expected to dip under 15C during Liverpool’s time there but that is not to say danger does not lurk. La Manga, after all, is where Leicester City’s squad were sent home from in early 2000 after a pre‑Worthington Cup final retreat went horribly wrong, with an even more controversial and damaging trip there four years later as the team battled against relegation from the Premier League.

And then, of course, there was Liverpool’s trip to Portugal before a Champions League tie with Barcelona in February 2007. Craig Bellamy. John Arne Riise. A golf club and, ultimately, infamy.

Leicester won the Worthington Cup in 2000 but went down in 2004, while Liverpool knocked out Barcelona in 2007 (Bellamy scored in the first leg at the Camp Nou and celebrated with an air swing), which, along with Southampton’s post-Switzerland slump two years ago, shows there is no obvious outcome to a mid-season break, be it in the cold or warm. All Sunderland’s players can do this week is run hard, play not so hard and on their return from the Big Apple ensure they make a big and immediate impact.

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