When the lights went out, quite literally, on Michael Beale in late January it seemed a metaphor for his impending divorce from Sunderland.
Beale was only minutes into a press conference at the Academy of Light, the Championship club’s training base, when a power cut plunged the complex into darkness. As the manager began talking after guiding reporters to a daylight-flooded atrium, the sense grew that it could well be a matter of time before the board pulled the plug on Tony Mowbray’s successor.
