If that’s true then I’m really disappointed as he setup completely wrong for that game. I was amazed by the starting line up. He screwed up massively today with the starting lineup and wasn’t able to change things during the game. I don’t know what Sunderland’s realistic ambitions are but they were so much better than us
My head is still scrambled by the switch around in defence after the subs. Manning and Bednarek at CB, Charles at RB, KWP sort of in midfield. Was so weird, like a free-for-all.
Just got home from the game. Can’t get away from the fact that so many players were off it today. A truly dreadful performance. I was listening to radio on way home, Leicester lost, Leeds were dreadful apparently. Is it a coincidence that the three teams with the most transfer upheaval put in poor performances today? Let’s hope this was just a bad day at the office and a wake up call that this is a really tough division. Also read rumours of Martin not taking the blame? The interviews I’ve heard he definitely took a majority of the blame.
Martin always shoulders the blame, But he also points out what we see as fans was wrong today, so he'll probably bollock the players. What RM needs to sort out is thr amount of space we are giving out wide, The fbs are doing as they are told, They need some help from the CBs and the DM to drop into defense so the space is mitigated and doe the attacking wingers to drop back and actually track the wide runners, otherwise we are just so easy to play through. Also, the 8s need to putting in more of a shift. Smallbone and Stuey were terrible today.
Hope I'm wrong but I'm not convinced by this manager.....decent man but fear he may be tactically naive.
Yesterday he definitely was. Have to hope this is a blip that he can learn from rather than a sign of things to come. Positives have outweighed the negatives so far though IMO. But we cannot be this easy to score against ever again
Sunderland fan here. We have a very young team and with our deadline day additions I hope this starts to move us up the league. If Ross Stewart regains his fitness he is a quality player, apart from his goals his work rate is phenomenal. Commiserations to anyone who travelled up here, hope you had a good day out, hopefully in Sunderland. Thats a long trip after a 5-0
Glad you had a good one mate. You guys are really on the way up after a long period of suffering sh*t, so can't begrudge you a result like yesterday. Milk it.
Bazanu avoided RM getting a 0-9 Everything else has probably been said We / Russ should have learnt a lot from that
Think the difference is you having a settled manager, whereas we are still trying to settle the ship with our fourth manager in 10 months. A couple of new players will adjust to your system, while we have an entire squad trying to comes to grips with yet another new system.
You'd like to think we not as the next time we play is Leicester visiting St Marys on a Friday night...
Under Roy Keane, didn`t Sunderland lose their first 4 or 5 games, and still win the Championship at a canter ?
Last season Swansea ended the season strongly. It isn’t so simple as RM gets worked out or he would get progressively worse as the season went on. Yesterday he set us up all wrong but it does show him that you have to build from the back. I think he has too much faith in Stu Armstrong and way too much in our fullbacks. Hopefully he learns some lessons.
Not to the degree that we did. We were appalling last season, we've lost a lot of players, a lot have come in, we have a relatively new manager, we've lost our captain and talisman, at least three players we thought were leaving didn't and we didn't really know that until late on Friday, and we were playing a newly promoted team who were very well organised and that can always be a challenge. We need a touch of realism here. The "we're going to p*ss the league" comments last week were pretty clueless to be honest. Were I one of the other teams, yesterday was the day I would have wanted to play us. We have the strongest squad in the league, and I think the best player in the league....we are going to get better and better as the team get used to playing with each other. We now just need to get organised. The football we were playing up to this week was mostly excellent, we just couldn't finish it. Now we have the players to do exactly that...especially if Stewart gets back to form and fitness - and if Adams clears his head. Yes our keeper is not exactly brilliant, and we won't keep many clean sheets - but I honestly don't think that will be an issue this season. Anyone expecting us to win 4-0 yesterday really wasn't playing with a full deck. I expected us to get a point at the most... admittedly not to lose 5-0 though! Remember - several of yesterday's team had never played together before. We need a touch of realism here.
My concern, as others have said, is that Sunderland’s game plan was pretty simple. Pack the middle of the pitch defensively and transfer from defence to attack extremely quickly and somewhat directly, largely bypassing our forward-thinking midfield with one pass. The fact that they scored from our own corner in minute 1 and almost did it again in minute 40 shows a real lack of learning and adaptability. We needed to be able to go more direct and even with the introduction of Che, we still didn’t and continued to fall into the traps they set. We definitely need a plan B for when it just doesn’t work.
