Cool Cat O’Shea getting used to fiery Italians

When John O’Shea signed off a recent interview suggesting that, where Alex Ferguson deployed the hairdryer, Paolo Di Canio favours “a flamethrower”, he delivered a parting quip that you can be pretty sure will resurface in a lot of the coverage of proceedings at the Stadium of Light this season.

Asked on a trip to Dublin if he’d care to elaborate on the remark, Ireland’s centre-half grins and offers only a sheepish, “It’s fairly self-explanatory, I think”. But while not denying the always potentially explosive nature of the Sunderland manager’s character, O’Shea insists that there’s solid method behind the perceived madness of the fiery Italian.

“When the new manager took over with seven, eight games to go last season, we were in a fairly obvious situation — he just had to keep us up,” he says. “But from the first day of this pre-season, he spoke about wanting to play a certain way and in a certain style, playing out from the back a lot more when we can and making sure we can last the pace of games, in terms of his ideas of the intensity we need to be winning more matches. He’s changed the squad around again, too and they all seem good lads.