Dusk has descended on the Stadium of Light, and David Moyes is sitting in his office. The ground is empty, the players are long gone, and the whistling of an elderly janitor echoes hauntingly through the halls. Moyes is staring into the mirror, and he sees a creased, unsmiling face before him. He is aged, aged by the crushing stress of managing Sunderland for a seemingly endless timespan, but what actually amounts to just over three months. He is drained of colour, drained of life. This is what catatonia feels like, and Moyes cannot take it anymore.Suddenly, the image in the mirror swims before him. It swirls, contracts and becomes kaleidoscopic, before metamorphosing into a succession of familiar shapes. In the mists of the mirror image, he sees 6"1 Lamine Kone being comprehensively outjumped by 5"6 Alexis Sanchez, and Olivier Giroud glancing a routine header past Jordan Pickford, and Ellis Short looking distant and disappointed on the other end of an ethereal conference call. Again, he sees his own face staring back at him. Then, in a moment of abject horror, it melts away, leaving only a puddle of liquid selfhood on the floor.Whether or not Moyes is actually experiencing nightmarish existential hallucinations at this point, the Sunderland job certainly seems like a threat to his managerial being. Having taken an unprecedentedly low two points from their first 10 games of the Premier League season, Sunderland are in a dire position; an abject capitulation to Arsenal this weekend certainly hasn't helped matters. With Moyes looking utterly broken by his experiences in the north-east, some have speculated that he could be on the brink of oblivion, and that this could be his final bow as far as football management is concerned. Were he to quit Sunderland now, he would leave with a 15.38% competitive win rate. Coming after his unhappy spells at Manchester United and Real Sociedad, it would be a sad way for his declining career to come to a final and conclusive end.The problem for Moyes is that, since his glory days as Everton boss, he seems to have lost his footballing identity. He used to be known and respected as a safe pair of hands, an adept defensive coach and a man who could inspire significant overachievement. Now, he looks lost, like a hermit wandering through the wilderness whose only nourishment is the occasional goal from Jermain Defoe. While he used to be a resolute and reliable manager, that reputation has been dramatically eroded over the last few years. Now, none of us know what he is. He is Scarlett Johansson at the end of Under The Skin, looking at his own reflection and struggling to understand it at all. **Fun fact: this is literally the only possible comparison between David Moyes and Scarlett Johansson.
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