Sunderland winger Aiden McGeady spent some time looking back on Phil Parkinson’s tenure at The Stadium of Light during the most recent edition of the SAFC Unfiltered podcast and the 34-year-old revealed when he knew that the 53-year-old manager wasn’t the right man for the Black Cats during the show.
Just over a year after he arrived at The Stadium of Light, Parkinson was sacked by the North East club back in November after a ‘sluggish start’ to the 2020/21 League One season, with the Black Cats aiming for promotion from the third tier this term.
McGeady made just 10 appearances under the now-former Sunderland boss before he was frozen out of Sunderland’s first-team setup by Parkinson, with the ex-Republic of Ireland international spending from the end of January until the end of July on loan at Charlton Athletic, who were playing one division higher than League One Sunderland last season.
With that in mind, it may be understandable if McGeady doesn’t hold extremely fond memories of Parkinson’s time as manager of the North East club and that may explain why, during this recent edition of the SAFC Unfiltered podcast, the winger revealed that it didn’t take him very long at all to realise that Parkinson was not the right man to take Sunderland forward.
McGeady said: (15:15) “Part of me thought he’ll get the sack soon, so I’ll just hang on, he’ll get the sack soon because without being too disrespectful, I could tell after 10 days, he wasn’t the man for the job. You can make your mind up pretty quickly in football.
“We went from Jack Ross to him and obviously you hear what people say about him and people make jokes about him being old school and all that sort of stuff but, I mean, we didn’t play any football, we had no gameplan, we hardly even trained, it wasn’t right.”
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TIF Thoughts on what McGeady had to say about Parkinson…
While he did emphasise that he was trying to make this claim “without being too disrespectful” it would certainly seem as though McGeady holds very little respect for the recently-sacked Black Cats manager, Parkinson, with the £653k-rated man making it abundantly clear that he didn’t hold the 53-year-old in high regard from very early on in his tenure at The Stadium of Light.
It would seem as though Parkinson didn’t rate McGeady either, given that he froze him out of his first-team setup and allowed him to join Charlton on loan from January until the end of the 2019/20 season and the 34-year-old went on to not make a single appearance for Sunderland’s first-team this season under Parkinson.
With all of this in mind, it certainly seems as though Parkinson and McGeady were simply not a good match for one another and if the 53-year-old’s successor, Lee Johnson, can get McGeady back on form for Sunderland, then maybe parting ways with Parkinson will prove to have been a very wise decision by the North East club’s decision-makers.