Declan John opens up on his bizarre Sunderland loan spell and what went wrong

The left-back has recently joined League Two side Bolton Wanderers on loan, ahead of his Swansea City contract expiring in the summer.

John joined the Black Cats on deadline day last January, with Phil Parkinson seeking cover for influential wing-back Denver Hume.

The 25-year-old looked a neat fit to offer competition in that position, a natural wing-back in Parkinson's preferred 3-4-3 system.

John did not make a single appearance before the season was postponed and then curtailed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Welshman says he was never given any real clarity on why he was routinely left out of the matchday squad during his time at the club.

"I wish I could tell you,” John told the Bolton News.

“To be honest, I’ve never really been given a good answer.

“I went in to see the Sunderland manager [Phil Parkinson] a couple of times and he couldn’t really give me a good reason and Swansea was exactly the same.

"When I went to Sunderland on loan, about two or three days before I reported to training the manager phoned me up for a chat, and he said he wanted me to come in and get games," he added.

“From the way it went I thought maybe I wouldn’t get in straight away, that it would probably be a couple of weeks and I’d be coming off the bench, that sort of thing. But it went on and on, and the chance just never came around.

“By the time I got to see him again to speak further about it, all the Covid stuff started happening and I’d been there six or seven weeks without a chance to show him what I was about.

“When I went back (to Swansea) I had about two or three weeks of training and then picked up an injury but after that I got a phone call telling me I would be training with the under-23s, so that’s what I have been doing ever since.”

Parkinson routinely said that there were no issues behind the scenes with John, stating that his exclusion was purely down to the balance of his bench and his desire to have more versatile options available in order to cover more positions.

John has trained with the U23s since returning to Swansea in the summer, and says any suggestion of issues with attitude are misguided.

“I try not to read articles about myself because I think it’s hard for people to know what it’s like behind the scenes or why clubs make the decisions they do,” he said.

“But this one was suggesting that I hadn’t made the team because there was a problem with my attitude.

“I have never been that sort of person but people do make assumptions about you when you spend so long out of a team and think something must be up because there’s a big chunk of your career missing.

“But I have always been someone who works hard and gets their head down. It’s as simple as that.”

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