Between October and March, Sunderland endured plenty of travel sickness; after Christmas in particular, we lost comfortably on several occasions without ever really laying a glove on our hosts.
Our poor run on the road was never a real cause for concern — although the 3-1 loss to West Ham in January was abysmal on a personal level — and amid the defeats, we did pick up some decent draws at Liverpool, Brighton, and Tottenham before the 1-1 draw at Bournemouth that set us on our away day revival.
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almost all of our away games this season, we’ve gone in as the underdogs — as you might expect for a newly-promoted Premier League team. At Leeds, with a weakened squad as a result of injuries, felt as though we were up against it and a very confident set of fans from Yorkshire seemed convinced they would batter us at Elland Road.
Fast forward around three weeks and it was déjà vu, this time with Newcastle fans looking at our squad, thinking they should put us to the sword and facing little resistance.
One thing both sets of fans had in common is that they saw Luke O’Nien starting at centre back and expected their sides to put about five goals past us — yet he’s been on the winning side in both games.
During those two away games, Régis Le Bris set us up to be tough to beat while also allowing us to break forward when possible. We’ve got the pace in our forward line to punish teams and for large parts of the games at Leeds and Newcastle, we had to bide our time before making our way forward.
It’s no lie to say we’ve not been great to watch in a few away games this year, but we’re averaging more than a point a game on the road so far, which is something a newly-promoted team should be proud of. Leeds, meanwhile, have ten points and Burnley nine, in comparison to our seventeen away points.
We’ve rarely controlled games this season and there wasn’t a single away game we bossed even partially, but this isn’t the Le Bris way,
It wasn’t in the Championship and it certainly wasn’t going to change in the Premier League. Yet at a time when we needed to make a shift from losing comfortably away from home, Le Bris switched things up and the results speak for themselves.
Keeping things tight at the back in the Premier League is easier said than done, but we currently have the third-best defence in the league and the rigid setup we’ve adopted on the last three away trips has led to results at a time when shifting our away day blues looked like a tough task.
We’ve got three away games left, against Aston Villa, Wolves, and Everton — and each will bring with it a different challenge. Wolves could well be relegated by the time we make the trip to Molineux but despite this, it wouldn’t be too much of a surprise if we took the same blueprint into each of these matches.
We’ll soak up pressure, keep things tight at the back and break forward into space as and when. This is the Le Bris way, and in each of our four away wins and a few of the draws, that’s been the setup, and it’s worked.
With nine points left to play for away from home, it’ll be interesting to see how many more we pick up.
