Just over four years ago, Sunderland built their academy and training grounds five miles or so outside the city. It's a magnificent place today, 245 acres of land taking in almost two dozen pitches and a massive, regal clubhouse. By all accounts, there are maybe six other football clubs in Britain with comparable training facilities and to the delight of everybody hereabouts, none of those are called Newcastle or Middlesbrough.

Anyway, the only eyesore on the otherwise pristine landscape is the huge crater on your left as you walk in the entrance.

Turns out this was the spot earmarked for the indoor arena they wanted to build as part of the compound (for although on Friday afternoon a pleasant breeze was all that wafted gently across your face, it was easy to work out that a few pages flipped either way on the calendar and outdoor training would be about as attractive as a weekend break in Beirut). But, and here's the rub, planning permission has been proving a tricky get.

Some say the problem lies with objections from the owners of a cluster of six houses about half a mile away who say their view of the countryside will be obstructed by the building of a big old gym. There are dark mutterings of one of those householders being a Newcastle fan but nothing has been firmed up. No, the biggest problem is that the academy isn't actually in Sunderland at all. The jurisdiction of the city's council . . . and therefore the wherewithal to grant what most assume would be a formality of a planning application . . . ends just about 200 yards short of where they need it to. Instead, the fine academy in which the futures of Sunderland's footballers will be moulded sits right at the outer reaches of South Tyneside. Let's just say the level of surprise at the repeated failure of each application isn't exactly through the roof.

It's a small problem that more than likely will be sorted out eventually and in the general scheme of things, just a quirk really. But in a way, it also stands for all the things that went wrong with the club during the final years of former chairman Bob Murray's reign. Good idea to build the thing, Bob. Bad idea to leave its completion in the hands of a load of Geordies.

As of Thursday afternoon, the Murray era is dead and gone. Niall Quinn's Drumaville consortium finalised the last of the deal and by Friday morning, he could start trying to buy players. Much as he is trying to keep a lid in things, the city believes the club has found a saviour. One who's bringing the smiles back and scraping morale off the floor. One who'll walk into a telephone box in his normal clothes and come back out in his discopants.

Friday lunchtime finds him in the notvery-chairmanly attire of a training top and shorts. You get the feeling a few agents are going to have to get used to talking to a club chairman who's just out of the shower and wrapped only in a towel. (That, or a suit with NQ emblazoned on the lapel. ) The hair isn't gone or even grey yet but then he's only been doing the chairman thing for two and a half weeks and the chairmanager thing for four days. Plenty of time for all that. In the middle of the summer, it wasn't too much of a stretch to say that there were two jobs in English football that no right-minded person would even interview for, never mind agitate to take on. Now Niall Quinn has both of them. Never do things by half, eh?

"I wouldn't have come back near football for anyone other than Sunderland, " he says. "This is the best-supported club I was ever at. But it was looking more and more possible that the club could become a Sheffield Wednesday or a Nottingham Forest. Once a club goes into freefall like that, it can be very hard to catch it. I saw it happening last season and couldn't bear to watch. It's our job to make sure it doesn't keep happening.

"The most important thing now, right now, is to stop the slide. There's no big targets, no way I'm saying we've got to get back in the Premiership by this time or that time. Right now, all we're concentrating on is changing the morale of the place and putting smiles back on people's faces. We need to win a few matches at the start of the new season and get people to believe in us again."

It wasn't a whim. He'll admit to certain whim-like tendencies from time to time but not here. When he left Sunderland in the wake of Howard Wilkinson's appointment in October 2002, he knew then that the club was headed for darker days before there'd be any semblance of light. He played one game under Wilkinson but that was on a Saturday and the following Monday, he sat down with the vice-chairman and said he wanted out. Under Peter Reid, he'd been first-team coach but that wasn't going to continue under Wilkinson.

"I wasn't part of this thing now and I wasn't comfortable with where it was all going.

It's easy to say that now but I could see at the time that the slide was going to get worse before it got better. They allowed me to leave and nobody made the slightest effort to stop me.

"So on the Monday morning, I went in to see the vice-chairman and we got everything sorted out and tied up. And as I shook his hand, I said, 'You never know, you might see me back here one day.' He said they'd love to see me managing the club some time in the future. And I said, 'No, it might be as something more than manager.' That was the first time the beginning of an idea entered my head because I could see the slide happening in front of my eyes."

Three years passed. Three happy years in which he moved to Kildare and played a bit of junior hurling here and junior football there. His kids revelled in being back in the land of their parents and grandparents and everything was peachy. But when he turned on Match Of The Day last August and saw the Stadium Of Light on the first day of the season with empty seats everywhere, his heart sank. He'd kept in touch with friends in the area and knew things were bad. But empty seats on the first day of the season and Sunderland just promoted to the Premiership? Jesus.

"Even I couldn't have foreseen how spectacular their fall would be. I went to some games at the back end of last season and the morale of the place was just through the floor. I remember the Arsenal game especially when people turned up hoping just to get it over with. We used to love getting the big teams here. We beat Arsenal, Man United, Chelsea, all of them. Big teams were never a cause for dread or anything.

But here they were, just cowering at the thought of Arsenal coming and making a show of them. It was soul-destroying."

Murray invited him to a charity dinner in February and over the course of their conversation, Quinn sensed a man who'd had enough. He is for the most part careful not to hammer into the man most Sunderland people would gladly never lay eyes on again, maybe out of politeness, maybe out of an acceptance that it won't achieve anything anyway. But in any reference to him, he's clearly keeping the rein short for fear of what might ensue if he let it out a touch.

"A week later, he inexplicably sacked Mick McCarthy, a decision that was neither here nor there. It was plain to everyone that if he was going to sack Mick, he should have done it earlier in the season when there was still a chance they were going to stay up or at least let him see it out to the summer. It was another in a long line of very questionable decisions.

"So with that, I decided to explore and see if there was a way I could do anything. I went to lunch in London with a friend of mine the day before Cheltenham. I told him I didn't know anything about how to go about it but that if there was a way that something could be done, I'd like to find it. I didn't know anything about the business side or about management, I didn't know anything about the non-footballing side. But what I did know about was the passion of the area that was going to waste. I said, 'I don't know if there's any money in it but who can I see that might be interested?'" The friend agreed to help him out but more to keep him happy and shut him up than anything. At Cheltenham, he was introduced to a man he describes as "someone who'd been involved in the acquisition of some parts of Man United for some Irish people there in the past" who said he'd happily go up to Sunderland and take a look around if the club allowed him to.

What Quinn didn't know was that his friend had basically asked this man to do it as a favour, that his instructions were to come back and warn him off. There's an old adage that says the only way to make a small fortune out of football is to start out with a massive one. This was the information Quinn was to be given. Nice idea, Niall, but stick to the horses, there's a good lad.

"A week later, I was summoned to lunch in London. And the guy said, 'Listen, I went up there with no intention whatsoever of coming back and getting you involved with this. Your friend said you were a nice fella so I was happy to do it. But I have to tell you, this is as good a business opportunity as I've seen in football for 20 years. If you can get a team together with the right financial backing, the club has a great chance.' I had a lump in my throat listening to him."

From there, sailing has been relatively smooth. The consortium is made up of seven well-healed businessmen . . . publicans Charlie Chawke and Louis Fitzgerald, property developers Jack Tierney, Pat Beirne, Patsy Byrne and Paddy Kelly as well as Sunderland-based travel magnate John Hays. They paid £10m for the club and absorbed an estimated £40m worth of debt. Their offer was accepted on 3 July and last Thursday they picked up the remaining shares.

Picking up the business side of things was and remains a steep learning curve. But all the while, the football side still needed to be fixed. The club had no manager but Quinn had ideas. Big ones. He approached two managers but won't say who they were. It is generally taken as read that Martin O'Neill was one of them.

"We were very ambitious in our search.

We knew what we wanted and, just as importantly I think, we knew what we didn't want. It wouldn't have been right for us to come into the place in a blaze of publicity and then appoint somebody who would make the public just shrug their shoulders. We didn't want a big name who'd failed in the past or a Championship manager who hadn't made it to the Premiership yet. We had two names on our list and we went after both of them and laid out our plans to them both. In both cases, we were very close to a deal. We spent a long time with the first person but he pulled out at the 11th hour. And with the second person, in fairness it didn't take as long, but it was a similar process and we were fairly confident we had him but with a few hours to go before a deal was done, he phoned me up and decided against it. In both cases, I think a lot of people were probably saying to them, 'Look, you can't take the step down. You're a big name, you're up here.'

The stumbling block in both deals was coming down to the Championship and risking their reputations by not being able to get back up, despite the fact that they were both impressed with our plans."

Before approaching the two men on his list, Quinn had a vague notion in his head that if it didn't work out with either of them, he'd consider taking it on as a stopgap measure. The second choice turned him down last weekend and by then, time was a factor, the new season just a fortnight away. So on Saturday, he sat down and discussed it seriously for the first time and that night, he rang Bobby Saxton, the old school coach who left the club disillusioned the same week Quinn did in 2002. He asked him to come back and help him out as first team coach. Saxton said he would only on the condition that the place was to be run properly. Quinn assured him of it, and with that, he had two jobs he never had before.

"As soon as we think we can sit a worldclass manager down and convince him that we're on our way to achieving our fiveyear plan, we will and I'll step back. We can't do that now. For all the smiles on people's faces, we're still the club that was relegated with the record low number of points in the Premiership last season. So we have to build ourselves back up. I'm perfectly prepared to walk away from the management side of things as soon as we can get someone worthwhile. If that takes three months or if it takes two years, so be it.

"I wouldn't take the club in the Premiership. If we're lucky enough that at some stage while I'm still manager we're looking like we're going to make the Premiership, that's the time we'll start seriously scouting around looking for a replacement.

And if I can't stop the rot and if I can't get the club stabilised and turning a corner, then I will go and find someone who has maybe done it in this league before but it will only be on a one-year deal or something like that. That's an option I hope never happens."

For the minute, he's changing the place day by day. There'd been a feeling abroad for a long time that the first team squad had become too far removed from the rest of the club . . . they still shake their heads sadly at the day Michael Gray turned up in a brand new Ferrari on the day dozens of groundstaff and dinner ladies were laid off . . . and so Quinn's trying to get them more involved.

Other staff are allowed to use the firstteam gym now where they weren't before.

Quinn's only signing to date, Kenny Cunningham, is organising a big barbeque for this afternoon as the local airshow . . . the North East's biggest summer event by some distance . . . careers along overhead.

Everyone's invited. The sense of fun is back. The sense of place. Won't matter a fig, of course, unless three points follows three points follows three points starting at Coventry next Sunday. But it's a start.

As for Quinn, he's adjusting, the big eejit.

He's resigned himself to the fact that the golf clubs are doomed to darkness for the next few years and although he says he's going to try and get home for the three matches that Dublin are going to win to lift Sam Maguire, he says it slightly more in hope than in confidence. Hope that he'll get home, you understand. That they'll win the thing is apparently a done deal.

You sit and listen to him rattle away with all the enthusiasm and all the vim he can muster and shards of your scepticism are gradually chipped away. Maybe he can do it. Maybe it is the chance of a lifetime.

Whatever happens, you know you'll be keeping an eye out for the Sunderland result every Saturday afternoon for the foreseeable.