Bugger.
Yes, I’m annoyed, and if you’ve opened today’s edition of Matchday Musings in the hope that there would be any gloss applied in the wake of one of the most embarrassing and infuriating cup exits in recent times, you’ve sadly decided to read the wrong article.
Why? Because as charitable as one can be when writing about Sunderland this season, caveating ups and downs in performance when appropriate and backing the players in the face of undue flak, there’s no way you can overlook such a woeful
display and result.
In the first instance, Port Vale — seemingly doomed to relegation from League One — weren’t very good.
Yes, they were industrious and I’m sure Ben Waine will be milking his winning goal and Alan Shearer tribute celebration until the end of time, but let’s be brutally honest: they’re a poor football team and had Sunderland turned up with the right attitude, the right approach and the right amount of resilience, a quarter-final berth would’ve been within our grasp.
Except we didn’t, and in the cold light of day, this has to go down as a major misstep; a golden opportunity to give everyone belief that another trip to Wembley was on the cards but instead turned into a horrible throwback to the 2018-2022 era, when these kinds of games were played out at league level and Sunderland would often come unstuck when considered as favourites.
How on earth we survived those years, I’ll never know. Does anyone miss lower league football? Watch this game back and try and claim you do — because I suspect you won’t.
Régis Le Bris will doubtless have to take the criticism that’s heading his way — and not unjustifiably so, because the boss carries the can when things go wrong to such a degree and you simply can’t lose to Port Vale as a Sunderland top flight boss and evade criticism — but did anyone in blue emerge from this with any credit? Debatable.
Melker Ellborg’s acrobatic header from a staggering Luke O’Nien backpass saved our blushes prior to Waine’s opener, and Nilson Angulo and Enzo Le Fée at least tried to get the Lads on the front foot on a pitch that resembled the inside of an Aero bar, but those are minuscule crumbs of comfort and the bottom line is that as a team, we didn’t apply ourselves nor play with the kind of efficiency that such cup ties demand.
Amid all of the problems we encountered in Burslem, perhaps the most worrying was that the Sunderland attack packed about as much punch as a Reliant Robin on a January morning, with Eliezer Mayenda barely able to influence the game and Wilson Isidor — after a fairly lifeless display against Leeds — unable to turn the tide, either.
Have we become too dull as an attacking team? Has the handbrake been applied with such force that we’ve curbed our creative instincts to an increasingly worrying degree? These aren’t unfair points to consider and there’ll be a lot of that done this week.
Of course, it’s tempting to demand wholesale changes in the aftermath of encounters like this and to use it as evidence that players X, Y, and Z aren’t up to par, but I still believe that the league is the barometer by which they should be judged and in that sense, it’s still a reasonably positive picture.
That said, the fringe players and lads who seldom see first team action didn’t really do their causes a great deal of good at Vale Park and it’s a safe bet that Le Bris will have noted that. We can’t afford to drop our standards and to brush off defeats like this with a simple “Oh, it’s only the cup and therefore it doesn’t really matter”. That’s the kind of attitude we need to leave behind — for good.
A very, very bad day, and we’ll simply have to absorb the mockery, the memes and the general sense of joy that others will feel after the Lads failed to rise to the occasion against an opponent who probably couldn’t believe their luck in the face of such a dire Sunderland display.
Despite this, we have to move on, to ensure there’s no hangover of any kind and that the visit of Brighton on Saturday provides a strong pick-me-up.
Everyone could do with that, and given that the small matter of the Wear-Tyne derby is very much on the agenda as well, this isn’t the time for a shock cup exit to knock the Lads off course. There’s too much at stake for that to happen.
Sunday 8 March 2026
Emirates FA Cup
Vale Park
Attendance: 10,685
Port Vale: 1 (Waine 28’)
Sunderland: 0
Port Vale: Gauci, John, Humphreys (Magloire 46’); Hall, Gabriel, Walters; Ojo, Gordon (Campbell 81’), Waine (Ward ‘88); Brown (Gray 57’), Archer (G.Hall 57’)
Subs Not Used: Amos, Headley, Hernández, Shipley
Sunderland: Ellborg, Geertruida, Ballard; Alderete, O’Nien, Diarra; Rigg (Xhaka 83’), Talbi (Isidor 68’), Angulo; Mayenda
Subs Not Used: Moore, J.Jones, H.Jones, Aleksić, Geragusian, Abdullahi, Whittaker
