Monsieur Salut writes: people left their Stadium of Light seats in droves, Pete Sixsmith sent demoralised text messages and I ended up giving three-out-of-10s galore in my ESPN FC ratings. So what did David Moyes make of it? Well, he has either lost track of time or, when claiming SAFC matched Stoke for all but the first 20 minutes, meant to say the 19 minutes they took, starting in the 15th, to put the game out of sight …
“It was a poor opening part of the game from us, not necessarily that we played badly, but three mistakes have cost us.
“We made it really difficult for ourselves and we were punished, but we got a goal back and in the second half we were better.
“We knew if we got a second goal we’d have the crowd behind us, but we created a couple of chances and unfortunately we couldn’t score.
“It would have been easy for the boys to hide and not try and take the ball, but Jack [Rodwell] had a chance, Fabio [Borini] had a chance and Jermain [Defoe] got himself in positions, we just didn’t get anything from them.
“We have been losing too many games this season but we’ve been using our home form as a positive and a confidence booster; if you take away the first 20 minutes of today’s game we did as much as Stoke today, but obviously it’s a 90 minute game and you have to be ready from minute one.
“Everyone knows we have injuries and players that are away, but we’re not going to use that as an excuse. The players that are out there have to perform.
“We’ve got the cup replay on Tuesday at Burnley, which will be another tough game, but we want to win it.”
I was there at this debacle. Why should JD stay he is better than the rest put together. However. Pundits have been repeatedly reporting that things are not right at safc if that is the case then look for the common denominators. Moyes should stay. But he should demand transfer cash and perhaps have a clear out of his back room staff. Clean sweep new brush etc. yes we are down. Accept it, start again with a new motivated set up at all levels. Just do it