'Everyone is watching Keane': Bennett

Sunderland manager Roy Keane has captured the imagination of the whole country with his remarkable charge towards the Barclays Premiership.

That is the view of former Black Cats defender Gary Bennett, who has seen the Irishman drag the club from the lower reaches of the Coca-Cola Championship table to its summit in the space of a little more than seven months.

Monday’s 2-1 come-from-behind victory at Southampton extended their unbeaten run to 16 league games and established them as favourites to make an immediate return to the Premiership, something which looked a remote prospect when Keane succeeded chairman Niall Quinn as manager at the end of August.

Bennett, a BBC Radio Newcastle pundit, said: “Who would have thought Roy Keane would have taken Sunderland to the brink of the Premiership by this point in the season?

“It has captured not just the imagination of the city of Sunderland, but the whole country and parts of Europe.

“Everybody is surprised, not just Sunderland supporters, everybody involved in football is surprised how well Roy Keane has done because it is his first job in management.

“You have got to remember where the club was on the day he took over. They had not won a game all season.

“It is a fairytale story. We have been following the club all season and we cannot believe where they are at the present time.

“When he first took over, people were talking about being happy if they finished in mid-table.

“They went on a little bit of a run and won a few games and there was a chance of getting into the play-off places; they did that and then people were talking about automatic promotion – now they are talking about winning the Championship.

“That just goes to show how far the club has come.”

The revival Keane, with unstinting backing from Quinn and his Drumaville consortium, has engineered has been little short of stunning.

Relegated from the top-flight with a record low 15 points at the end of last season, they lost each of their first five games of the new campaign as league defeats by Coventry, Birmingham, Plymouth and Southend were followed by a Carling Cup exit at the hands of League Two strugglers Bury.

Quinn, who had reluctantly stepped into the limelight after failing to persuade his big-name targets to take the job at the Stadium of Light, returned to Keane and this time got the answer he wanted.

The former Manchester United and Republic of Ireland skipper was in the stands as goals from Neill Collins and Dean Whitehead secured a 2-0 win over West Brom on September 28 last year, and although the Black Cats’ rise has been steady rather than meteoric, their recovery has continued apace ever since.

The relationship between Keane, a tempestuous, driven player, and Quinn, his genial compatriot, is governed by a strict demarcation: football is purely the concern of the manager, and the chairman takes care of everything else.

Bennett said: “It is working at the present moment. Roy is focussing on what he wants to do. He know where he wants the club to be and he focusses on how he wants them to go about football games.

“Niall is letting him get on with it and providing all the back-up he needs.

“There is still a lot of work to be done, but they have laid the foundations.”

A city which bore the scars of another humiliating relegation just a few months ago is once again buzzing in anticipation of promotion and even bigger things to come, although that hurdle still has to be safely negotiated.

Bennett said: “The hardest thing was getting up there. They have been playing catch-up all season. Now they are up there and everybody has to catch Sunderland.

“There are four games to go and they are on an unbeaten run of 16 games.

“People are talking about them going unbeaten until the end of the season, but every hurdle they have come to, they have got over it.

“Birmingham was going to be a tough game, West Brom, Derby County, Cardiff, yesterday at Southampton, but they keep proving people wrong.”