Tony Mowbray has been reunited with key ally Stuart Harvey on Wearside - 18 months after he persuaded him to leave Blackburn Rovers and climb aboard the Sunderland 'juggernaut'. Harvey spent six years at Ewood Park and was latterly head of talent identification there before joining the Black Cats as head of recruitment in April last year.
Mowbray's subsequent appointment as head coach, along with Mark Venus as his assistant, means three pillars of the Blackburn regime are working together again, while another ex-Ewood man, midfielder Corry Evans, is a central figure for Sunderland on the pitch. But Mowbray has revealed that he had to convince Harvey to leave the Championship club and take the opportunity on offer at Sunderland, who were in League One at the time.
Mowbray is a big admirer of the work Harvey does behind the scenes, and his working relationship with the Northern Irishman meant he was quickly brought up to speed on Sunderland's recruitment strategy when he took over from Alex Neil almost a fortnight ago. "When Stuart left Blackburn to come here, he had conversations with me because I think he had reservations and he enjoyed working with myself and Mark [Venus] - he actually lived with us, we were like the three stooges living in an apartment in Blackburn!" smiled Mowbray.
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"I had to persuade him to come to Sunderland, to be honest. We were so close and he is so good at what he does, the work ethic and the detail is so intense.
"I liked working with him at Blackburn, we had an amazing time, but when the opportunity came around, I spoke to him and likened it to this huge big tanker is going to come flying past your little car. Sunderland can be anything, can't it?
"It is like a juggernaut coming along on the highway of the Championship. If we can get it right and grow, at some stage, who is going to stop Sunderland with 40,000 passionate supporters?
"I told him he had to go, and now here I am too because of circumstance."
Sunderland have set out their stall to build incrementally rather than throw vast sums of money at the squad following promotion, with new owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus determined that the club should be run sustainably rather than pile up debt. And Mowbray was attracted by the prospect of a long-term vision rather than the more precarious short-term strategies that have backfired at other clubs.
He said: "When we get it right here, this is going to be a juggernaut that it is hard to stop. We have to keep ploughing on to where we all want to get to.
"It's not a short-term thing - as I said we are a juggernaut, not a racing car."
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