Tom: Black Cats were so arrogant in Pompey loss
Tom O’Connor had to fill in at leftback, which he did well apart from one shocking pass, but that disrupted his midfield partnership with Deji Oshilaja.
Had it been a home game, there might have been time to summon Blake-Tracy to the squad.
Surely, now, one of the two leftbacks will get a game in their natural position and not just in tonight’s Papa John’s Trophy game against Aston Villa Under-21s, the competition in which Blake-Tracy wore the armband and did play left-back – with Borthwick-Jackson ahead of him in midfield – against MK Dons.
The Leak-Shaughnessy partnership in the centre now looks secure again, at least until either or both are challenged by the return to fitness of Sam Hughes towards the end of the year.
Shaughnessy, after all, has been a revelation, the one defensive summer signing to nail down a place so far, having played every minute in the main competitions.
While they were admittedly short of forward options, it seems daft now to think that Rochdale played him up front last season while they were conceding 78 goals on the way to relegation from League One.
The likely back four, then, for the trip to play Plymouth Argyle on Saturday, is Hamer, Shaughnessy, Leak and Borthwick-Jackson, which will be the youngest the Brewers will have fielded in quite some time, although Blake-Tracy’s challenge to Borthwick-Jackson cannot be ruled out.
The positions are now otherwise likely to be threatened by Mancienne’s return to fitness before that of Brayford or Bostwick.
How the younger quartet copes should be a good pointer for the future and Hasselbaink assures us he is looking beyond this season already.
FORMER Burton Albion defender Tom Flanagan admits Sunderland paid for their arrogance when they were thumped 4-0 by Portsmouth on Saturday.
Sunderland went into the game eight games unbeaten and after thrashing Cheltenham Town 5-0, while Portsmouth had gone seven without a win and were beaten 2-1 by Burton in their previous match.
But, with another former Brewer, Marcus Harness, opening the scoring on his 100th Pompey appearance, the Black Cats were knocked off the top of League One.
“It’s embarrassing,” admitted.
“We’ve come away sitting in the dressing room and we’ve got nothing to say, we can’t say anything to each other. We just have to look at ourselves.
“We got our brilliance and our arrogance mixed up.
“We were too arrogant and not brilliant enough, whereas on Tuesday we had the perfect combination and put them (Cheltenham) to the sword because of our brilliance.
“On Tuesday we didn’t let our arrogance get in the way but on Saturday we went to Portsmouth, they were in a bit of a bad run of form and we want to stick it to them because we want to shut the crowd up and they taught us a lesson.
“It was a really disappointing day and, hopefully, it’s a turning point in the season when we now go six or seven games unbeaten.
“This hurts us but this has to hurt us, it can’t be ‘we’ll be better next week’ because we have set a precedent now.
“A lot of teams will think ‘we’ll do what Pompey did to them’ so it’s a big day and we have to learn.
“People will say we’re young, we’re this, we’re that but we are all playing in the team and it doesn’t matter what age we are.”
The game was played in torrential rain on the South Coast and Flanagan further admitted that Sunderland were complacent in failing to adapt their style.
Asked exactly what went wrong, he said: “I think the conditions, complacency to a man.
“We have been playing so well and have such a good style of football, we believe in it so much, and we almost thought we could just play our style
Flanagan no matter what.
“It was the wrong day for it, we needed to mix it up and the manager (Lee Johnson) said it in the dressing room before.
“It has nothing to do with him, it was completely and utterly on the players.
“We didn’t match them and that’s the bare minimum, and we didn’t do that.
“We can maybe say it was an offday but if you want to get where you want to get as a team and as a player and as a club there are no off-days and we let ourselves and the fans down.
“We want, everyone wants, to go somewhere with something and the further we go and higher we go as a team, the bigger the games, the bigger the occasion, it’s all about big games.
“On Saturday, we let ourselves down and people will question our big game ability.”
Flanagan is one of a “leadership group” in the squad, picked out by the manager, and had his say.
“We have all kind of had a bit of an awakening, so I just felt I’d say something,” he added.
“I wasn’t the only one who said something, a few others said stuff because we can’t always look to the manager to tell us what to do on the pitch.”
Flanagan, back on international duty with Northern Ireland this week, played 82 games for Burton between 2015 and 2018 and has now played 97 times for Sunderland. 1957: 2004: 2007: Three-time Olympic champion Marion Jones pleaded guilty to lying to US government investigators when she denied using performance-enhancing drugs, then announced her retirement from athletics. She was sentenced to six months in prison in January 2008.
2010: Australia retained cricket’s Champions Trophy with a six-wicket win over New Zealand at Centurion.
2011: Former England bowler and Ashes winner Graham Dilley died at the age of 52 after a short illness. Dilley played in 41 Tests and took 138 wickets.
2012: John Terry’s defence against claims he racially abused Anton Ferdinand was “improbable, implausible, contrived”, the Football Association panel which found him guilty ruled in its 63-page report. Terry, who had been acquitted of a police charge of using racist language in July, was handed a four-match ban and fined £220,000.
2014: Marussia driver Jules Bianchi suffered a crash at the Japanese Grand Prix. The Frenchman underwent emergency surgery and remained in a coma until his death on July 18, 2015.