Patterson top of Cats ‘minutemen’
SUNDERLAND’S marathon 52-game season is over and now is the time to reflect on the campaign as a whole.
In addition to the 46 Championship games, the Black Cats played three FA Cup matches, two play-off games, and one Carabao Cup tie.
Tony Mowbray and his predecessor Alex Neil utilised 36 players over the course of the season, with some playing thousands of minutes and some making only blink-and-you’llmiss-it cameos.
Goalkeeper Anthony Patterson was the club’s only ever-present in the Championship, playing every minute of every match. It is no surprise he spent more time on the pitch than any other Sunderland man with a total of 4,500 minutes in all competitions.
He fell just 180 minutes short of the maximum possible, as he was rested for both the Carabao Cup defeat at Sheffield Wednesday in August and the FA Cup third round win at Shrewsbury Town in January.
Winger Jack Clarke was second on the list with his 4,179 minutes in all competitions, and midfielder Dan Neil also scraped into the 4,000 club having played 4,001 minutes.
Clarke and Neil missed only one league game apiece – both through suspension – or they would almost certainly have been ever-presents along with Patterson. The top five was rounded out by two defenders, with Danny Batth playing a total of 3,650 minutes, and Luke O’nien 3,566.
At the other end of the scale, academy striker Tom Watson’s first-team debut lasted just two minutes when he came off the bench in the league draw against Huddersfield Town in April.
And midfielder Caden Kelly played six minutes in the Carabao Cup at Hillsborough, with young wideman Michael Spellman playing 10 minutes of the same game.
Chris Rigg became Sunderland’s youngest-ever outfielder at the age of 15 years and 203 days when he came off the bench in the FA Cup third round game at Shrewsbury in January, and he went on to make two further appearances in the same competition for a total of 24 minutes. January signing from Everton Joe Anderson was eased into the first-team, with the centre-back playing 39 minutes of Championship football in the second half of the season.