Brewers outlasted Black Cats, can they go again...?
TOUGH TRIP NEXT TO FACE THE U’S
EVERYWHERE you looked, there were stand-out performances from Burton Albion on Tuesday night against Sunderland.
There had to be because, for their second successive visit to the Pirelli Stadium, the Black Cats looked like one of the best teams in League One.
They were brilliant when they won 3-0 in Burton in February, with Lee Johnson forging them into a cohesive unit, and they were two games into a 12-match unbeaten run which carried them to the brink of the automatic promotion places.
Had I been a betting man, I would have backed them to go on and be promoted. I would have lost my money.
Somewhere along the line, it went wrong for them. They only won one of their last nine games in the regular season and were 10 points short of the automatic spots by the end, before losing to Lincoln City in the play-off semi-finals.
It will have been an uncomfortably familiar feeling for long-suffering Sunderland supporters – as will defeat to Burton on Tuesday. They have won only two of eight meetings with Albion.
It was clear that the Black Cats had the better chances and moved the ball around more fluently than the Brewers for most of the night.
But, ultimately, they did not quite have that utter bloody-mindedness and will to win that Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink is building into his Burton squad – nor anyone who could match the moments of magic with which Jonny Smith scored the only goal of the game and deserved to add another with a brilliant strike which stayed out off the post.
They did not have a goalkeeper as inspired as Ben Garratt currently is, a pair of centre-halves as mobile and determined as the still-new partnership of Conor Shaughnessy and Ryan Leak or a pair of holding midfielders who appear to complement each other as well as Tom O’Connor and Michael Mancienne.
As good as Terry Taylor will be and, in many ways, already is, it was calming to see Mancienne back on the pitch for the Brewers.
He looks utterly assured and unhurried in all he does and Ipswich Town were stopped in their tracks when he replaced Taylor after 40 minutes in the previous game.
Ipswich captain Lee Evans had been targeting Taylor after an early booking, winning a series of free kicks as he went to ground and wasting no time telling the referee about it.
Hasselbaink removed Taylor before he was sent off and Ipswich had to think of something else.
In the 92nd minute, with the game as good as done, Mancienne clattered into the back of Evans and left him in a heap, collecting a booking. Was there an element of retribution? “That’s a real foul, you’re entitled to go down for that one!”
I may be putting two and two together and making five but it looked like a lesson handed out to me.
Whether it was or not, Mancienne had no need to do anything like that against Sunderland, although he did pick up another booking.
How refreshing it was to see two sides concentrate only on getting on with the game, looking to make their passes count rather than merely bumping up their possession percentage.
The game was breathless and, in the end, Burton just outlasted Sunderland.
And there’s the rub. They just outlasted Ipswich, too, and kept going right to the death to take the Carabao Cup tie against Oxford United to penalties with a late equaliser.
Those three games came inside seven days and Hasselbaink felt afterwards that his side had seen a dip in their energy levels against the Black Cats, understandably, he said.
He may well have made them the fittest team in the division, with a pre-season the players repeatedly say is the hardest they have known. But can they keep up this pace? Cambridge United tomorrow will provide a stern test, probably of a different sort. Suddenly, Burton are the established League One side with a bunch of newcomers looking to show they belong at this level.
It seems unimaginable that a Burton side under Hasselbaink will go out with any less determination for a
game against Cambridge than they have done for games against “big clubs” like Ipswich and Sunderland.
But they will have to go out and prove it and we have seen in the past that Cambridge home crowds can be as raucous and intimidating as many others.
Will Hasselbaink will continue his policy of making as few changes as possible or will he decide it is time to rest someone? He says he has had little option but to keep using the same players because of injuries but that really only applies up front.
My guess is he will ask them to go again, given there is no midweek match to recover for after Saturday, albeit the following game, at home to Cheltenham Town, has been pulled back to the Friday.
Above all, though, it is a good time to remember not to expect too much, just yet.
Expectation and excitement levels were high for the season and will only have risen with a 100% start in the League.
Truth be told, though, either the Ipswich game, which swung on Scott Fraser’s penalty miss, or the Sunderland game, which perhaps swung on Aiden McGeady’s embarrassing first-half miss, could have been won by the opposition on a different day.
They were not but, as Hasselbaink says often, this is still a work in progress.