As the clock ticks, Steve Bruce comes a little closer to confronting the moment when the Rubicon must be crossed. The moment when he will have no option but to drape a red and white scarf around his neck and beam broadly for the cameras. Bruce is in the process of swapping his post as Wigan Athletic's manager for the equivalent job at Sunderland. In return, he'll gain an enhanced salary, a generous transfer budget funded by the Wearside club's billionaire owner, Ellis Short, and watch his team play in a 48,000 capacity stadium.
There is, though, no such thing as a free lunch and, once he scrawls his signature on a lucrative contract proffered by Niall Quinn, Sunderland's chairman, Bruce will, in one fell swoop, sever the ties that have long bound him to Newcastle United. Wigan's out-going manager has always made a big thing of being a Newcastle fan, has always played up his black and white allegiances at every opportunity, so there will need to be a short period of re-focusing while we all get used to seeing him in red and white.
As recently as March, Bruce was heavily tipped to become Newcastle's manager this summer and has regularly talked, with more than a hint of regret, about 2004 when his son Alex called him a "daft prick" for turning the St James' Park vacancy down in order to remain loyal to his then club, Birmingham. For a while, during the coming weeks, he will meet cynicism from a minority of hardline Sunderland fans whose hatred for the "skunks" knows no bounds, while their Newcastle counterparts will doubtless delight in dubbing him a traitorous "mackem".
Such taunts would, however, only threaten to become a real problem were Bruce to endure a bad start to the season, in which case Sunderland supporters would no doubt blame the toxicity of their manager's black and white blood rather than Anton Ferdinand's failure to concentrate for prompting poor results. Overall, though, this is a pragmatic age where, even in north-east England, once fierce parochialism is increasingly being quelled by globalism's siren call. Indeed when confirmation of Bruce's appointment finally arrives, most fans, of both clubs, will probably smile, shrug, and say something along the lines of "seems a nice bloke and a decent manager, good luck to him".
More significantly, it will not be lost on those of either persuasion that Bruce's installation at the Stadium of Light is emblematic of a tilt in the north-east football power balance. For decades Newcastle's poor relations, Sunderland fans are now hoping that, courtesy of Short's millions and Bruce's transfer market nous, they might just roll back the clock to those far distant days when they were variously known as "the team of all the talents" and "the Bank of England club".
Unlike Roy Keane, Bruce – whose "non precious" personality should go down well among those Sunderland employees who remember treading on eggshells around the Irishman – boasts a top quality and international contacts book, with Wilson Palacios and, for half a season at least, Amr Zaki two of his key finds. To land Zaki, Bruce had sufficient wit to travel to Cairo, hire a car and drive himself – a feat which no one who has ever visited the Egyptian capital will underestimate – to a Nile-side meeting with his target. Suitably impressed, the hitherto underwhelmed striker agreed to join Wigan.
If Bruce's Middle Eastern as well as South and Central American contacts could yet unearth Sunderland a few more unpolished gems, he also boasts the knack of bringing the best out of under-achievers without, a la Keane, needing to resort to ruling by fear. Just look at Emile Heskey's re-birth at the JJB Stadium, not to mention Antonio Valencia's sustained influence and Lee Cattermole's radical improvement since swapping Middlesbrough for Wigan last summer.
Understandably, Bruce was said to be tiring of the need to continually sell – and replace – players such as Palacios and Heskey. Indeed, this probably more than Dave Whelan, the Wigan owner's, reflection that "Steve always wanted to return to the north east" has informed his flight east. Granted, the Corbridge-born Bruce and his wife Janet – brought up a few miles down the Tyne valley in Hexham – probably always imagined they might well end up somewhere back near where they started out. It is, though, safe to assume that such imaginings centred on St James' Park rather than the Stadium of Light.
No matter, Newcastle's loss looks very much like Sunderland's gain. Or rather it should do just so long as Bruce does not fall into the "Lee Clark" trap. Remember Clark? A talented midfielder now managing Huddersfield. He played for his beloved Newcastle before signing for Sunderland. Unfortunately, Clark's Wearside career came to an abrupt end when, in 1999, shortly after helping his new team to promotion, he attended Newcastle's FA Cup final defeat against Manchester United wearing a T-shirt proclaiming: "Sad Mackem Bastards". A move to Fulham was soon completed.
Distracted by other things in his life, like playing for Manchester United and attempting to write the odd novel for instance, the more rounded Bruce was never that fanatical a "Mag". Even so, just to be on the safe side, he will probably be well advised to discard anything black and white currently residing in his wardrobe – and, sorry Janet, the same probably goes for Mrs Bruce too.
