Gary Rowell: 'Pride is back despite red card'
Though it might be stating the bleeding obvious, Sunday's game against Manchester City completely turned on George McCartney's 15th minute sending-off.
The upshot of that though, is that it makes it very hard to analyse the match, simply because we'll never know what have happened had the two teams played 90 minutes with 11 men.
People will sometimes say there are times when a team can play better with 10 men than 11 but that's usually if a team is reduced with only 10 or 15 minutes to go.
If a team is reduced to 10 men with only 15 minutes gone, it's a completely different story: you are looking at an absolute mountain to climb.
You know for certain that one side is going to have the lion's share of possession and chances while the other will be feeding off scraps and playing with their backs to the wall.
I would have liked to have seen how a City side that had played 120 minutes in the Uefa Cup three days earlier would have fared. I suspect Sunderland would have run the legs off them by the end of the game, but, we'll never know now.
What we do know, is that Sunderland produced a very creditable performance against a side that has been in phenomenal form at home over the last few months.
Sunderland didn't shirk the challenge.
Sometimes you can get a real pasting in games like that and with Sunderland conceding a penalty less than five minutes after the sending off, the signs looked bad.
But they came through that and showed what they didn't show against Wigan the previous week, which was fantastic desire and commitment.
If they'd played with that "let's roll our sleeves up" attitude against Wigan, I think they would have won.
We got a bit of our pride back with the effort and the fight the players put in.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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