Sunderland Greats: Jordan Pickford

Long before Jordan Pickford was an England all-time great he was earning his chops in Sunderland’s academy — bursting onto the scene in a way only he could.

As has been mentioned before, it is not as easy to put forward a player as a ‘Sunderland Great’ from the modern era (i.e. the last twenty years) because everyone’s memory of them would be that much fresher. An off-season for the player, or being associated with a miserable season for the club, would dampen many people’s estimation of what would normally, without question, be a ‘great’ player.

My own argument is that we spent ten years in the Premier League and they were not all bad seasons. To compete in the top tier of English football for a decade, we must have had some players who could and did go toe to toe with some of the best opposition out there.

Selecting players from older, long-gone eras is much easier in some respects – not least that any off-field negative issues are long forgotten. For this week’s ‘Sunderland Greats,’ I was just about set to write about a player who featured over a century ago.

That is until England somehow progressed further in the Euros than anyone who watched their first four games could believe. So, with Sunday’s final against Spain looming in Berlin, the natural choice for this week has to be Washington-born and one of our own, Jordan Lee Pickford.

Jordan, who grew up and still is a massive Lads fan, joined our academy at the age of eight in 2002 and progressed through the age groups. What was apparent even at that age was just how good he was with the ball at his feet. We hadn’t quite reached the present era of sweeper keepers, but Jordan was ahead of his time as a teenager.

It drove the Academy boss Kevin Ball nuts, with him commenting,

Jordan was unbelievable. He was just as good as an outfield player because of that natural footballing talent with his feet. But that also became a problem. We wanted to play the ball out from the back and the keepers had to use the defenders.

I remember Jordan pinging the ball 50 yards to the right-winger with his first touch. I said, ‘What you doing, we want to play out from the back?’ He said, ‘Yeah, but I’m better than them.’ I looked at him and thought, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’

As many have noticed in some interviews, there is a confidence or even an arrogance of belief in his ability that was around at a very young age. But that kind of arrogance is present in many of the very top players – Cristiano Ronaldo, Eden Hazard, Peter Schmeichel – are just a few down the years who were the same, and what can you say when a player knows they are the best at what they do?

He was promoted from the academy to the reserves in 2011 and then followed a series of loan moves over the following seasons, starting with non-league Darlington and eventually the Championship with Preston North End. All were lengthy stints with plenty of games, so that before the up-and-coming Jordan had got near a starting berth in the Sunderland first team, he had racked up over 100 games’ worth of experience.

On those occasions when a young player in the Academy and under-23 side starts to make onlookers sit up and take notice, the reports are usually along the lines of an ‘emerging and promising player’. This wasn’t the case with Jordan Pickford. Instead, the feedback coming from the Academy was that the coaches fully expected him to become a ‘top quality’ player.