Cats push their luck once more with fightback from goal down
Sunderland 1 Fleetwood Town 1
ANOTHER game played, and Sunderland remain unbeaten in League One.
They are not playing convincingly at the moment, but their results are heading in the right direction.
There were good and bad things to take from yesterday’s 1-1 draw with Fleetwood, where the hosts were once more slow out of the blocks. Here we look back at some key talking points.
Are Sunderland starting to believe their own hype?
On the one hand, the way the Black Cats pushed for a winner in the last 15 minutes, when they seemed to be the only side interested in one, perhaps deserved a goal. The closest they came was when Glenn Loovens bundled a corner against the post after terrific goalkeeping by Alex Cairns to deny Tom Flanagan.
But the Wearsiders could easily have lost the game too, with Kyle Dempsey’s short ball squirming through Jon McLaughlin, but at such a trickle the goalkeeper was able to stretch back and claim it. Over the course of the 90 minutes, Fleetwood were arguably the better side. In the first half, there was no debate at all.
Normally it is good to see a team playing with the belief that they can overcome early setbacks – what we would have given for that last season or the one before – but in this case, it appears to be breeding sloppiness from Sunderland.
McLaughlin’s second-half penalty save also prevented Fleetwood retaking the initiative after the Black Cats had worked so hard to level things up.
They are so confident that they can recover from 1-0 down – naturally, having done so five times already this season a n d s t i l l not having lost in League One – but they seem to think they can pick and choose when they start to turn it on, and Oxford United and Fleetwood have shown in consecutive home games that is not the case. On the other hand, they continue to avoid defeat when playing badly, and that is the sign of a successful team. They need to be careful not to push their luck, though. Sunderland getting into bad habits
Okay lads, we get the message now. We can see you have the backbone some of your recent predecessors had in coming from behind, but there really is no need to labour the point.
Once again the Black Cats were worryingly lacklustre for the first 35 minutes, and once again they gave their opponents a one-goal headstart. At least this time they did not have a man sent off too.
It said much about Sunderland’s first-half performance that Dylan McGeouch rarely featured in it. The Scot is the sort of midfielder the play is supposed to go through, but his side just could not get the ball down and play.
Rather than be intimidated by playing at the Stadium of Light, Fleetwood rose to it and had all the early chances.
Sunderland were given a sixth-minute warning when Ashley Hunter took the ball around Jon McLaughlin, but saw his inviting cross scrambled away. They ignored it, allowing former Carlisle United striker Paddy Madden free passage to head in at a second successive corner.
Had it not been for Loovens’ alertness in cutting James Husband’s cross out, Madden would have been presented with another takeable chance, but not as good as the one Madden headed back from the byline into the