Phil Smith: The big risk Sunderland are taking as head coach search drags on and silence continues for fans

And still, Sunderland fans wait.

Saturday will mark three weeks since the end of what turned out to be a bitterly disappointing Championship campaign but there have been no hands held up, no accountability. Perhaps most significantly, no route forward plotted and outlined, no line drawn in the sand and nothing to give supporters optimism that things will be different when they return from the summer.

The retained list has been released, but with no accompanying comments from the sporting director or any other senior club figure. The club's new Chief Business Officer has spoken openly of his vision for the future and his key plans, but on the football side there has been nothing.

Perhaps even more remarkably, it is now more than three months since Michael Beale was dismissed and Mike Dodds placed in interim charge. Kristjaan Speakman said then in a club statement: "We will be updating our supporters further as and when significant developments are made.” That was 95 days ago. Since then, nothing. Results plummeted, the season drifted and the front-foot playing style evaporated. Sunderland looked rudderless on the pitch and it was impossible not to join the dots and think this was in no small part because they were rudderless off it. Fans have not heard directly from chairman Kyril Louis-Dreyfus since his statement on social media apologising for the Black Cats Bar debacle in January.

There was, if not an acceptance, then at least an understanding that this was in part to give the club the time and space they needed to get things in order for a summer rebuild. In the one communication since Beale's departure from the club's sporting director, Speakman told the supporter collective at a structured dialogue meeting that the club had wanted time to reflect on what had gone wrong but in the appointment of Beale and afterwards. That time had been sought to run a lengthy recruitment process, which should in theory increase the chances of a more successful outcome. Even if those final weeks of the season proved to be a painful chore, supporters stomached it in the expectation of a fast start to the summer rebuild. That hasn't happened, and so it begins increasingly to feel like a failure of leadership whether that be a fair assessment or not.

So what do we know about where the search for a head coach actually stands? The reality is that the circumstances which saw Sunderland opt against a permanent appointment in February still largely stand in place. Sunderland felt that a better and larger pool of candidates would be available in the summer, having been frustrated by their attempts to land their preferred candidates in the middle of the season when Tony Mowbray was dismissed. With many domestic divisions just finishing and the managerial merry-go-round only now beginning to really gather pace, it's no great stretch to surmise that the club have been waiting for the key parts of a broader jigsaw to fall into place. The view of the hierarchy has been that patience has been required to land the best calibre of candidate, and it's clearly the case that there are figures in the frame not yet in the public domain. Soon, though, that pool begins to shrink again. Danny Rohl has agreed a new deal at Sheffield Wednesday and though it's not clear the extent to which Will Still has been a genuine frontrunner this time around (he was not when the process began, but then departed Stade de Reims and became a free agent), he too looks to be moving forward with potential opportunities elsewhere.

At this stage in late May, we have probably not yet reached the point where the stasis impacts preparations for next season and that is clearly part of the reason why Sunderland have been happy to wait. As players begin to weigh up their next steps and the recruitment wheels start moving next month, that will change.

There is a greater risk to this quiet and this purgatory, though. The first and most obvious is that it risks putting the new head coach on the back from day one. Perhaps an appointment will be made that makes immediate sense, that shows a clear strategy and explains why Sunderland have had to wait. But what if it doesn't? The stakes get higher to land a preferred candidate the longer the delays go on, and the repercussions of not doing so become more significant.

The second is that it frays trust between club and fanbase further. Mowbray's departure was, supporters were told, to help take the next step in building a high-performance culture. What has been high performance about what has happened since? There was no evidence of smart succession planning or decision making in the process that ended with Beale's appointment, or in a January window that came and went without the team's key issues being addressed. The team that finished the campaign was a shadow of the 'bold, creative and industrious' motto to which the regime operates. The club's rise from the doldrums of League One to a Championship semi final built a certain element of trust in the process, and that it's a club which by and large keeps its cards far closer to its chest is clearly a good thing.

But that trust has eroded a series of poor decisions, and as of yet there has been nothing to give supporters optimism that any of those are being addressed.