Tony Mowbray thought his Sunderland team deserved their victory over Norwich City and was especially happy with his team’s resiliency in coming back from a goal down to snap their losing streak.
Midway through the first half, Hwang Ui-Jo gave the Canaries the lead against the run of play. However, goals from Trai Hume and Dan Neil placed Sunderland ahead at the interval, and ten minutes from time, Jack Clarke completed the comeback with his ninth goal of the season from the penalty spot. I think it was the right result for the way the game went,” Mowbray remarked. When they scored, it seemed a little bit like we were back where we started. I don’t think they had been in our half before, and now we’re behind by one goal. With some really strong, positive front-foot play, we showed incredible grit to take the lead before halftime. We needed that. I felt that we were unfairly punished for losing three games, even though some of our performances were passable.
“You have to accept defeat on the chin, and maintaining our confidence was crucial for us. We played them numerous video from the Leicester match, emphasising the benefits of attacking first. We performed admirably today, suffocating them for extended periods of time. They didn’t really ask questions of us until the final fifteen minutes, during which we had the opportunity to score more goals on the break.”
Despite dominating early on, Sunderland controversially dropped behind. Gabriel Sara was obviously offside as a forward pass was made to him, and Pierre Ekwah stopped, expecting the assistant to raise his flag. Sara, however, failed to touch the ball, which let Kellen Fisher overlap and set Hwang up.
“I had a chat with Pierre, not an angry one, just a chat about what happened,” Mowbray remarked.
“He’s waiting for the linesman to put his flag up and the full back comes bombing past. He wasn’t offside and he got caught. For me, it’s fine, it’s a lesson. “I didn’t knock too much confidence and belief, I think they felt they were on top and dominating. We did a lot of work on breaking down deep blocks and we did. It would be nice for our strikers to score, but we got it done. We deserved it, our performances have warranted wins and today it definitely did.” Sunderland now have a full week to prepare for next Saturday’s trip to Swansea City. Mowbray said: “I’m looking forward to having a week now to prepare for the next game.
“I was pretty confident that the players were still confident. I talk to our analysts a lot and I wanted lots of positive clips from the games we didn’t win, to make sure they didn’t forget that this is a good team and we’re going to win a lot of games. Yes we have to learn from defeats, but we want them to stay positive.”
