Mike Dodds left Sunderland earlier this season

Sunderland continued their worrying run of form heading into this month’s Championship play-offs with a 1-0 defeat at the hands of QPR on Saturday afternoon.

The Black Cats have now lost five matches in a row, and their notable slump has left many supporters wondering what the root cause of their drop-off has been. One theory that has been repeatedly posited by some is that Regis Le Bris’ dressing room is missing Mike Dodds, who left Wearside back in February to take over as head coach of League One outfit Wycombe Wanderers.

Since then, Sunderland have won just five of their 16 Championship outings, but to what extent has Dodds’ departure truly been a factor?

How badly have Sunderland been affected by Mike Dodds’ exit?

Speaking on the latest episode of On The Whistle, when asked about Dodds, The Echo’s chief SAFC writer Phil Smith said: “I think this is a really interesting question and I'll sort of say from the start, it's an almost impossible one to answer definitively. I’m not in the dressing room, not around it all the time, so it’s really hard to pick up on that. But I think I can maybe give a little bit of insight and give my opinion on it.

“So I think that Mike Dodds is very probably being missed by some of the players in the sense that Mike Dodds over a long period of time built up really, really strong relationships with a lot of these players in the dressing room. Not just the younger players either, to be honest. A lot of the senior players he had really, really close ties with. And I do wonder if that sort of more human touch, if you like, that closeness that he has, that ability that maybe he would have had to pick up on the players' moods, how they're feeling and maybe where they need some support or whatever, I think it's natural that that would be missed.

“I think Mike Dodds leaving will definitely have left a little bit of a gap in the coaching staff, if that makes sense, because just purely from the fact that he was there for such a long time and he'd been through a lot with those players, he'd built up those relationships. So my feeling is it's probably a little bit of a factor.

“I'm not convinced that there has been a tactical shift because Mike Dodds has left the coaching staff, if that makes sense. I actually think that Sunderland have a coaching set-up... I think Mike Dodds is quite aligned in the way he sees the game with Le Bris and the other coaching staff. If you think back to the way that Sunderland got quite often set up towards the end of last season under Mike Dodds, defensively - apart from one or two major exceptions, don't get me wrong - the defensive strategy, the organisation and structure of the team was always pretty good .There were days when, for whatever reason, the players didn't turn up and Sunderland got picked off, but generally speaking, I don't think there was any ever major doubts about Mike Dodds' ability to set the team up defensively.

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“I think that the issues that Sunderland were having more often than not towards the end of last season were in the final third and that's something that's continued. So I'm not sure that tactically there's been a shift since Mike Dodds left. I think what we're seeing is really a continuation of some of the issues that Sunderland have had for the best part of 18 months since Tony Mowbray left. For me, there's a bit of a question about the level of Sunderland's attacking play since that point, to be quite honest, apart from that burst at the start of the season when Sunderland looked a really, really good counter-attacking team.

“My feeling is that Mike Dodds probably is a miss and it's well known what a good coach he was, how close he was with the players, but I don't think it's anything to do with the tempo and the tactics of the team, to be honest.”

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