John McCormick writes: Some days, you think “I wish I’d been there”. I don’t think that fits today, judging by the Radio Newcastle commentary which I listened to and the personal letter from the manager to M Salut, which I recently read:
Sunderland 1 Leeds Utd 0
Dear Colin,
It was a big decision to include Patrick [van Aanholt] today; it was tough, especially with our full back situation.
With all due respect to Leeds we told Patrick to treat the game as a friendly and for him to ease his way back into it, as you do when you’re returning from an injury to make sure that you’re okay.
We know what qualities he brings to the side and we’ve not seen him score before – he’s even scored before Santi [Vergini], which is surprising when you look at some of the chances he’s had in the last year.
We needed to kill the game after being the better team in the first half and creating so many chances.
It wasn’t necessarily down to Leeds’ goalkeeper that we didn’t score but perhaps our finishing – we needed to be more clinical.
I think we allowed Leeds to get back into the game, we could have had it finished before half time, but they came back out for the second half and threw everything at us.
However, it was a cup game and we needed to get through and win and we did that, we’re in the draw for the next round.
I always say the best we can hope for in the next round is to be at home against the lowest ranking team, so we’ll see what happens in the draw tomorrow.
Thanks for your support,
Gus Poyet
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We started well enough. PvA injected some width and pace going forward but we seemed to lose shape after Rodwell went off although Seb did OK in his place. At the end though we had Wickham, Fletch, Seb, Gomez and Johnson all playing through the middle and the width went. But we won.