Sunderland Preview

[Tim Southampton Rover]

The BBC must really hate us:

Wigan 0-1 Liverpool

Derby 1-1 Bolton

Sunderland 2-1 Blackburn

[SIMON GARNERS 194]

Well done lads..we've bounced back well from the two defeats!!

Now lets silence them pesky greeks

[daren]

hahahhaha, the Beeb have really gone downhill, but who can blame them, they're probably still trying to get the computer to believe the Pompey-Reading score

[bluebruce]

Who remembers Keane saying, after our semi final game against Chelsea, that Sunderland 'would beat either of those two teams'?

[modes98]

Spent the day driving my mum around to sort out her new car so i missed the majority of the game and just caught bits on the radio.

First half sounded awful, whereas we came to life in the second and fully deserved the 3 points. Shame we missed out on the clean sheet.

[OJRovers]

Good win today, kind of makes up for losing to Pompey last week. We would maybe expect to win the home game / lose the away one.

Level on points with Chelsea with a game in hand - great start to the season!

[tonyoz]

A great win and some good football up to the final third. Santa Cruz was the star performer - a class act. I can't agree with those who voted Bentley man of the match. I thought he was very disappointing. He received a lot of ball in good positions but his distribution was awful. He took the momentum out of many promising moves and tended to pirouette each time before attempting to move the ball forward.

My second place man of the match would be Emerton. A typical energy packed performance with his determination and awareness leading to the 2nd goal.

The defence generally was very good but there were a couple of dodgy moments towards the end, just before their goal. I reckon Sunderland are going down - we benefitted from their poor defending which compensated for our lack of cutting edge. You could see thousands of Sunderland fans streaming out long before the end.

All in all, this was a job well done and keeps us in the mix but we need to get the ball forward faster if we want to make full use of Santa Cruz's talent.

[pg]

Looking at the team sheet I had presumed that we were 4-4-2 with a midfield of

Dunn Tugay Mokoeana Bentley

Apparently we played a 4-5-1... so was Derbyshire playing on the left wing, with Dunn in central midfield playing behind Cruz?

[RoversFanUSA]

Great result. I remember last season when we lost it felt like it would take forever to get back to winning form. Glad to see everyone got there ish together. Kepp it up boys.

[Mozzer]

maybe derbyshire right wing, tugay and mokoena in central, dunn left wing, bentley behind cruz..we played this against birmingham, and it worked...

[Roar of the Rover]

2 decent performances before a crucial game, shame about the clean sheet. If we keep scoring goals like this, we should'nt have a problem on Thursday night.

[RevidgeBlue]

Apparently we played a 4-5-1... so was Derbyshire playing on the left wing, with Dunn in central midfield playing behind Cruz?

Twas a sort of five man midfield with Derbyshire wide on the right. Didn't suit him by the looks of things, thought he had his poorest game for us and was substituted.

[RevidgeBlue]

Great result today despite a poor first half from both sides. During that period our five man midfield meant we looked solid enough but the excellent Santa Cruz was left isolated with the result that we posed no threat up front.

Just like on Wednesday night we appeared to crank it up several gears after the break, getting more support up to Santa. Two quick goals killed it off ten minutes into the second period and the only minor quibble was that we rather casually tossed away two or three golden opportunities to put the match completely beyond doubt. On another day that might have cost us, particularly as we let one in right on the final whistle leading to an unnecessarily tense four minutes of injury time.

Overall though we never looked in any real danger of not winning once we got the two goals ahead. Maybe not a result to go completely overboard about as Sunderland did look very poor - or was that because we did such a good job on them?

Man of the match by some distance was Santa Cruz imo. Samba (again) and Ooijer (who I'm not a fan of) were excellent and Emerton did brilliantly leading up to the decisive second goal. Everyone else was solid and workmanlike rather than dazzling apart from Derbyshire who had an off day.

Very satisfactory all in all. One or two egos left on the bench or even out of the squad recently and two wins out of two.

[bluebruce]

Twas a sort of five man midfield with Derbyshire wide on the right. Didn't suit him by the looks of things, thought he had his poorest game for us and was substituted.

Who filled in on the right in his place, Rigters? Also, anyone know anything about Tugay? I read on the gamecast thing that he came off injured.

[USABlue]

Great result this one, I was a bit concerned about this game for some reason.

[Lee]

More like this...

Friedel

Emerton          Ooijer            Samba            Warnock

                      Mokoena          Tugay

            Derbyshire                              Dunn

                               Bentley

                            Santa Cruz

(except that it doesn't want to move Friedel to the middle)

Rigters played where Derbyshire was. Tugay was fine when he came off.

[Anti-Dingle-Brigade]

More like this...

Impressive stuff from Brad, he was stood at the cornerflag and they still didn't manage to score!

[mattjansen]

And two games in a row without any cards in a Rovers face

[American Rover12]

knock on wood; you know the minute someone commits a rough foul, everyone and anyone will be bashing the "dirty club"

[Fife Rover]

Did anyone else notice the uncanny resemblance to the game against Larissa? Rovers 2 goals were 80 seconds apart (77 secs at Volos), and the second goal in each case was a direct result of a defender making a badly short attempt at a pass-back to his keeper. Another coincidence was that Rovers second goal today was from Emmo's cross after he picked up on the poor pass-back.

[Jordan]

Snats a man

[Rover Down Under]

I thought we deserved to win yesterday, Friedel hardly had a save to make. The formation was unusual but it was a workmanlike rather than flair team, shame no-one told Bentley this - the commentators summed it up best when he said "simplicity is genius" after Bents had tried to be too tricky again and failed - I hope the Player of the Season / England call-up isn't going to his head. Bents wasn't dissappointing yesterday - he ran his socks off - just that he played the wrong ball, he did get really crowded out a lot though and Sunderland were quite rough - I think we will not be finishing bottom of the fair play league this season for once! The ref was also very good, he got all the non-penalty decisions correct and didn't go card crazy which was lucky for Sunderland cos there were a few horrific tackles from behind and petulance at the end when Bents got shoved around.

Overall we dictated the play for most of the game, the only problems I saw was that there were a few occassions when we could have played better earlier balls in the last third, we seemed to slow down and let the Sunderland defence get back to cover. We really need Reid back! Also sometimes Dunn seemed to be lost for inspiration, he should work in training more with Tugay.

Other things of note:

- Derbs didn't like being on the right but he was a better option than McLazy.

- Santa is magnificent in the air, he wins almost everything and still nods it onto a Rovers player. Can't believe he chews gum the whole game, isn't it dangerous?

- Emo's vision for the second goal was brilliant

- Warnock & Emo going forward worries the opposition, Samba going forward terrifies them!

- I think I'm just going to vote now for Samba as MoM for every game for the rest of the season he is that awesome...

[thenodrog]

Great result today despite a poor first half from both sides. During that period our five man midfield meant we looked solid enough but the excellent Santa Cruz was left isolated with the result that we posed no threat up front.

Just like on Wednesday night we appeared to crank it up several gears after the break, getting more support up to Santa. ......

................Very satisfactory all in all. One or two egos left on the bench or even out of the squad recently and two wins out of two.

Basically a typically efficient 4-5-1 awayday performance. Grind em down in the 1st half, quieten the crowd and then hit em hard in the second half. I've advocated this formation as an awayday tactic for some time (it worked with just Dickov up front so I'm damn sure that it can with Cruz or Roberts) but no doubt our undeserved reputation as dogs of war has prevented Hughes from adopting it too frequently.

It aint pretty of course but with the right personnel it's pretty effective as we found out to our cost v Pompey. Lets hope that we get another chance to use it in europe this season.

[Shevchenko]

Who filled in on the right in his place, Rigters? Also, anyone know anything about Tugay? I read on the gamecast thing that he came off injured.

Pedersen came on for him and Dunn switched to the right. Rigters came on for Dunn during the last five minutes.

Tugay did take a knock on the back of his ankle/achilles tendon. He came back on for a few minutes but didn't look comfortable and was taken off.

[tchocky]

The formation was unusual but it was a workmanlike rather than flair team, shame no-one told Bentley this - the commentators summed it up best when he said "simplicity is genius" after Bents had tried to be too tricky again and failed - I hope the Player of the Season / England call-up isn't going to his head. Bents wasn't dissappointing yesterday - he ran his socks off - just that he played the wrong ball, he did get really crowded out a lot though and Sunderland were quite rough

Agreed. He's very good at wriggling away from pressure - now he has to learn to pick out the right pass. No good with fancy tricks if there's no end product. That's a criticism that applies to when he plays in a central role, mostly. When he's out right my only criticism is that he doesn't use Emo more.

So for me, MoM goes to Santa Cruz.