When the teams were announced on Tuesday night and after reading the comments from some fans online, you would think Régis Le Bris had named a team made up of builders, plumbers and postmen.
There was almost a definitive conclusion that Sunderland were going to lose comfortably and that the mighty Leeds — with their mystical, ‘Elland Road under the lights charm’ — would be too much for us, so it was very surprising to everyone when we went and beat them, keeping a clean sheet in the process.
It’s bizarre
to me that some fans still like to write us off, even though we have a proven track record of being able to bounce back from a poor run of form under Le Bris.
We know how to dig in when we need to and after three straight defeats, we came back to pick up four points away at Bournemouth and Leeds — another fine example that, mentally, we were never going to be in a relegation scrap this season.
The rhetoric heading into the Leeds game seemed to be based on the idea that the hosts just had to turn up to beat us — and their home record combined with Sunderland not winning on the road since October and having half a dozen first team players absent contributed towards this.
There was immediate concern when Luke O’Nien was named as a starter and with the captain’s armband, with Granit Xhaka on the bench, yet on his first ever Premier League start, O’Nien received the ‘man of the match’ award from the TNT Sports team — a surprise, considering how the totally unbiased pundits were foaming at the mouth at full time.
He’s trusted and he’s good enough to play in the Premier League. This is now confirmed and I couldn’t be happier for him.
This group of players has a level of grit and determination we rarely see at Sunderland. It didn’t matter that every man and his dog seemed to be predicting a Leeds win — we were set up well and yes, we used some of the ‘dark arts of football’ to run the clock down and shut up shop.
Most teams in the Premier League do this, so just why Leeds were clutching their pearls, I don’t think I’ll ever know. They’re a good team with some quality players and I think they’ll avoid the drop, but there’s no way they didn’t see a Sunderland performance like that coming.
We’ve been fantastic this season, and reaching forty points with nine games to go is an incredible but much-deserved achievement.
Sunderland have picked up more points at this stage than in seven of our last ten Premier League campaigns and with the target of the ‘magic forty points’ hit, there’s no telling what this squad could achieve if the handbrake were to be released ever so slightly.
We’re roughly three-quarters of the way through this season and barring the odd poor game here and there, Sunderland have shown how a newly-promoted team should set up to avoid relegation. We’ve also taken seven points from four games against the two other promoted teams — one of which is going straight back down.
Keep the faith, because even when the going gets tough, this team has shown us that three hard-fought points are never far away.
