Lewis Grabban hopes Aston Villa promotion can help people forget his relegation in same season
It sounds like one of those dreaded pub quiz questions: which player turned out for two clubs relegated and promoted in the same season?
Lewis Grabban is hoping his name is added to the unique list of players to experience such a capricious campaign, as he prepares for Saturday’s Championship play-off final.
Grabban will spearhead Aston Villa’s attack in the £170million shootout at Wembley, five months after playing on loan at crisis-stricken Sunderland.
The 30-year-old striker scored 12 goals in 20 games for Chris Coleman’s strugglers, before he was recalled by parent club Bournemouth in January and then sent out to Villa for the remainder of the season.
Sunderland’s relegation was “inevitable”, admits Grabban, as the club suffered the nightmare scenario of dropping into the third tier for the first time since 1987.
But he is now on the verge of helping guide Villa back to the Premier League after a rollercoaster 12 months he can never have envisaged.
“It’s been a weird season and hopefully the relegation won’t go down too much on my record,” he said.
“I don’t think anyone thought at the beginning of the season that Sunderland could do that. But everyone expected it after a certain amount of time and it didn’t look like anything was going to change.
“They’re not the first big club [to go down] and won’t be the last. Leadership from the top of the club is important, so is investment.
“Now I’m at Villa and one of the reasons I came here was to try and get promotion. If we do that, it will be a successful season.”
Grabban has delivered the anticipated impact at Villa after signing on deadline day, scoring eight goals, and his experience has been vital during the final run-in.
With Villa now possessing so many experienced campaigners, such as former England captain John Terry, Mile Jedinak and Robert Snodgrass, Bruce’s squad finally appears capable of coping with such high expectation.
Grabban is one player fully in tune with the vagaries of the play-off rollercoaster: Saturday’s showdown with Fulham is the fifth play-off final of his career. Last season he was part of the Reading team which lost to David Wagner’s Huddersfield on penalties.
“When you lose, you just want to go home, get out of the stadium as quickly as possible,” he said.
“Winning with Norwich [against Middlesbrough in 2015] was the best day of my career. It’s a bigger achievement going through the play-offs than automatic.
“You do the season, then you’ve got the pressure of three games to get through. We’ve got through the semi-final but the job is nowhere near done yet.”
