Norwich City 0 Sunderland 1: Highlights as Abdoullah Ba goal gives Cats big win at Carrow Road

Here’s what the Championship table looks like after yesterday’s matches.

Here are our predicted line-ups for today’s match

Predicted Sunderland XI: Patterson, Hume, Ballard, Batth, O’Nien, Neil, Ekwah, Roberts, Ba, Lihadji, Clarke

Predicted Norwich XI: Gunn, Aarons, Hanley, Gibson, Giannoulis, Hernandez, Sorensen, McLean, Sara, Idah, Pukki

Norwich have won their last three matches to move up to sixth in the Championship table following last weekend’s 3-2 win at Millwall.

To find out more, we caught up with Connor Southwell from the Norwich Evening News on the latest episode of The Roar podcast.

You can listen to the full episode here

Here’s what he said when asked about the side’s key players:

“Gabriel Sara has really come on in the last few weeks. They signed him from Brazil in the summer for, you’ll hear price tags of £10million but it was probably more like £6million which is still quite a lot for the Championship.

“He came to Norwich injured, didn’t learn the language and we’ve seen sort of slow quiet improvement from him.

“I would say since David Wagner has taken over he has just skyrocketed in terms of performances, he’s kind of playing him kind of as an eight or a box-to-box player.

“Onel Hernandez is another who has struggled for consistency during his time at Norwich but under David Wagner he’s got five assists, including for an own goal last week.”

And here’s what Norwich boss David Wagner had to say about Sunderland.

“A very good footballing team,. They like to dominate the ball, they play good technical football. They have a young squad, a lot of energy. Before the last three games, they were challenging and in the top six.

“We won’t look at their recent results, we know they have a good team. We need to make a special atmosphere, everybody needs to know and feel that we have a chance to make it four wins in a row.”

Here’s what Sunderland boss Tony Mowbray had to say about facing Norwich during Friday’s press conference.

“I hope we can go to Norwich which is obviously a tough game, they are up into the top six now and have been in the Premier League.

“Now they have pushed themselves into the play-off positions so we know away from home it’s a tough game, but we have faced these games in the past and will hopefully give a really good account of ourselves and make life difficult for them.

“We need to test ourselves really. I think Norwich away will be a good football match. They are a good football team and want to play with the ball.

“I said to them this morning I was watching some of the chances we created away at Fulham and the energy and the drive and the number of bodies we got forward in the box in that particular game.

“With total respect to Norwich, Fulham were sixth or seventh in the Premier League so we should really fear anybody who perceives themselves as a football team

“We will look forward to the challenge of that game and then two home games against Sheffield United and Luton.”

We’ll start with the Sunderland team news.

Lynden Gooch has travelled with the squad and is available again following a knee injury.

Dennis Cirkin remains sidelined, though, as he recovers from concussion.

Aji Alese has also been ruled out for the season with a thigh injury, while Ross Stewart, Corry Evans and Elliot Embleton are sidelined with long-term injuries.

Mowbray also said on Friday that he watched an ‘important player’ in his group suffer a suspected muscle injury in training.

For Norwich, striker Josh Sargent looks set to return after missing the side’s last three games with an injury.

Midfielder Gabriel Sara missed training earlier in the week but did return to training.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of Sunderland’s Championship match at Norwich.

The Black Cats will be looking to bounce back following three successive defeats, including last weekend’s 5-1 defeat against Stoke.

We’ll have live updates, analysis and reaction from Carrow Road throughout the day.