Phil Smith: Sunderland in a better place than anyone imagined when Alex Neil left for Stoke City - but his legacy is huge

What a thrill it was, to see a Sunderland side under the most intense of pressure so ready to meet the moment, so in control of its destiny.

They had come so far and in such a short space of time: the coolest heads in the cauldron. That was Alex Neil’s Sunderland, that.

Neil is back this weekend, though you’ve probably already heard.

It is Sunderland’s credit that it is going to be a day slightly less emotionally charged than most had anticipated on the afternoon that he stunned Wearside by leaving the Academy of Light and heading for Stoke City.

At that moment there was acrimony, there was anger (at the club more than at Neil - how could this have happened?) and there was deep concern about what would come next.

Could anything be more ‘typical Sunderland’ than the man who had done so much to stop us all talking about ‘typical Sunderland’ leaving to join the team he’d beaten literally days earlier?

What’s followed has been calmer and more fun than anyone would have anticipated. With Stoke City clear of the dropzone but little more than that, it has led to something of a reappraisal of Neil’s time at Sunderland. Given how well a relatively similar group of players have coped at Championship level, perhaps it follows that promotion was if not an inevitability then a probability.

That’s when you think about that night in Sheffield, though. Why even despite everything that followed, Neil surely deserves to be recognised as one of the most important figures in Sunderland’s resurgence.

It can be a little easy to overplay the fact that he had inherited a side that had just lost 6-0 to Bolton Wanderers, for it’s also true that it was the same side that had reached a cup quarter final and won 5-0 against Wednesday not too long before.

But there were some truths self-evident about the situation when Neil arrived. Sunderland were a talented side with a soft underbelly, too often being exposed against stronger sides on the road. That was very obviously derailing their promotion ambitions, and as a result a very familiar sense of panic was beginning to engulf the campaign. The squad had a host of excellent players, but some had played too much and some too little.

A bizarre managerial search had left fans rightly furious, exposing some major reservations about ownership issues that wouldn’t be resolved in any meaningful way until after promotion was secured.

Neil, without any fussy, calmly set about fixing the things that were relevant to him and steadfastly refusing to engage with anything that wasn’t. When Sunderland eventually settled on Neil as their new head coach, it was because their analysis suggested a consistent record of overperforming relative to budget and most significantly, in sparking an almost immediate improvement in his teams.

It was a tricky first week or so, but in the end that was pretty much exactly what he did. Take a look at how the side developed from that moment to that afternoon at Wembley and it tells you everything. Lynden Gooch had been on the brink of leaving the club in January but ended the campaign playing some of the best football of his Sunderland career in an unfamiliar position.

There had been a point early in Neil’s tenure when introducing Corry Evans from the bench had drawn murmurs of discontent; now he was utterly integral. Jack Clarke and Patrick Roberts were flying by the time the play-offs came around but only because their return to regular football had been so well managed.

Perhaps even more impressive was the way Neil built both a team and a fanbase that arrived at Wembley with genuine belief that they would go on and win. That, as much as anything else, seemed so far away on the day he walked in. Neil managed emotions and expectations perfectly, Sunderland were confident but not arrogant, calm but not complacent.

They were an almost entirely different team, which is to say that there was nothing inevitable about their promotion. Neil built the team Sunderland needed. It brought back Championship football, allowed for the arrival of so many of these young talented players and even more significantly, allowed the club to retain the best of those already in the building. Some legacy, for a few month’s work.

As for his departure, well that is altogether more complex and perhaps it’s better to try and stay within the frameworks of the clear facts.

Neil has spoken since his appointment at Stoke City with enthusiasm about the premise of recruiting youth, developing and selling on to reinvest. Stoke have also appointed a technical director since his arrival, suggesting that it’s not the principle of the ‘model’ (we really need a better word for that) that forced his departure.

Yet a head coach at Sunderland, he is named ‘manager’ at Stoke. The technical director is a figure who Neil worked with at Norwich City. The shift in power dynamics for Neil feel obvious. And, after insistence from all parties that a rolling contract at Sunderland was perfectly natural, Neil signed a three-year deal at Stoke.

He deliberately steered clear of discussing his decision in depth after arriving, but did reference the infamous patience and scope Stoke’s ownership give their manager to shape things the way they see fit. There aren’t many clubs where you get that anymore.

Though Neil did agree improved terms shortly before leaving Sunderland, that this was never announced tells you at least one party didn’t deem the matter resolved satisfactorily. Stoke deemed Neil’s value to be greater, in the end. By the time Sunderland were offering what they believed to be a top-end wage for a Championship boss, it was already too late.

What has aged pretty well, it is fair to say, is Sunderland’s conviction that their work and their path was the right one and bigger than any one individual.

The four players signed in the days immediately following Neil’s departure have for understandably produced varying levels of consistency but all have shown serious and enthralling talent.

They hired a head coach who has not just continued the adaptation to the Championship but taken it to the next level, creating a side that can control and delight in a way that few would have thought possible at the beginning of the campaign. Culturally he has proved an outstanding fit, responding to the inevitable setbacks with a shrug of the shoulders, a couple of revels and a ‘it’s fine, that’s football’. He's driven by winning, but has a genuine enthusiasm for developing footballers. It's a pretty good marriage, in his own words.

Sunderland, in short, arrive at Saturday’s reunion in good health and good spirits even accounting for back-to-back defeats and yes, the lack of a striker or two.

A guiding factor in the way Neil is received right now may well be the rancour of his departure. The semantics of leaving the day before a game, of watching another Championship fixture minutes after Sunderland were beaten by Norwich. The indisputable fact that whatever the logic, he left for another club. That’s fine, that’s football as his successor might say.

The emotion and the passion is what drives the whole thing, and gives the work Neil does purpose. What’s the point in good coaching and management, if not for days and noise like that at Wembley?

Neil came to watch Sunderland when the two sides were training in Dubai during the World Cup break, a sign that things are pretty cordial now and maybe in time that's how we'll all come to see it: an arrangement that allowed two parties to get to where they ultimately wanted to be, having come together with it all to prove.

For now it may well be that the manner of his departure denies him the reception his work deserves, because it really was outstanding.