SUNDERLAND is at the same time both a wonderful and dreadful football club.

The good parts are really good. The North East of England is a wonderful place to live. All the clichés about the people being open, friendly and funny are true.

The Stadium of Light is named after the mining industry which once propped up the region. Inside the main stand, banners from the local NUM branches decorate the walls. This is a proud working class club incredibly comfortable in its own identity.

The supporters are magnificent. Year upon year they are served up utter dross and yet they keep going back. Aside from Middlesbrough which is just down the road, every away trip last season was something of an ordeal. It takes three and a bit hours to get to Manchester one way. That’s a short day.

The training centre is incredible and a new indoor pitch has been built since I last visited when I worked on the patch. What is not to love? Well, just about everything else if that makes any sense.

If anyone were to write a book about how not to run a football club then Sunderland AFC would be the main character Mistake after avoidable and obvious mistake have been made over recent and not so recent years.

The decision to make Paolo di Canio the manager sticks out. It wasn’t just that he was utterly unsuitable for the job but the way the club handled it on the day of his press conference still makes my toes curl.

A press officer went around every member of the media to tell them ‘the gaffer will only be talking about football’ days after David Miliband had resigned as vice-chairman because of the new manager’s supposed fascist sympathies, which Di Canio cheerfully wrote about in his autobiography.

Suffice to say, we didn’t stick to the script and the press conference descend into hilarious chaos.

The sordid Adam Johnson affair was handled appallingly. That stain on a proud club has not gone away.

Martin O’Neill was not faultless in his ultimate failure at the club he had supported as a boy but it’s a hell of a place for sucking the spark out of good managers and players.

They are not a sleeping giant. This has never been a successful club, at least not for a very long time. They famously won the FA Cup in 1973 but you have to go back to 1936 for their last Division One title.

And getting back to today, relegation will hit hard. Sunderland’s wage bill is £83million, they have debts of £110m and while there aren’t too many good players, anyone the new manager would want to keep will have to be sold.

Oh, and the once enthusiastic owner Ellis Short wants out. With all due respect to a club and support I have a lot of time for, there won’t be too many billionaires out there desperate to invest in Wearside.

All of this brings us to Derek McInnes who Sunderland would like to talk to about replacing David Moyes. He may not be interested, the club itself may go down another road – Gary Monk and Nigel Clough are other candidates – but it would hard to imagine a conversation between McInnes and Martin Bain, formerly of Rangers and now at Sunderland, who sounded out Walter Smith about who he should appoint will not take place.

I have no idea what Aberdeen are paying McInnes but I’m reliably informed the 45-year-old would be offered somewhere in the region of £500,000 a year by Sunderland and be given two seasons to win promotion, and the bonus for doing so would be in seven figures.

Also, because there would be a clear-out, McInnes would be able to start again. The parachute payment helps and this is a man who has proven track record of getting the best out of players.

The Aberdeen manager is a talent and has ambition. He is also not daft. Celtic are only going to get better. The size of the gap over the second best team in the country wno;t be smaller any year soon. But at the risk of angering my many Sunderland supporting friends, McInnes should go nowhere near that club. It is graveyard for careers and that is what he must think of.

Of course, he could say yes, go down there and do a magnificent job. He is a seriously good manager and at this moment in time it might be the best option for him if he does fancy a move.

However, if he wants my advice – and who wouldn’t – he should stick where he is and wait for a better offer to come along if, indeed, his plan is the test himself elsewhere in the near future.

Anyway, there might be a big job coming up at the SFA soon enough and I’m told McInnes is a favourite of more than one inside Hampden. I’m just saying…