Phil Smith's Sunderland AFC verdict: The key question for Michael Beale and his side after a crucial win

What kind of team are we going to be, Michael Beale wondered aloud afterwards.

Not for the first time, not even for the first time this week in fact, he had seen his players show two very different faces across the course of 90 minutes. They can be vibrant, they can be frustrating, they can be excellent and they can be too easily stifled. If we can say the one thing that they most definitely are, it is inconsistent. Often not just from week to week, but from half to half. 

Was this the classic example of that most resilient of football clichés, Beale was asked afterwards, the game of two halves? Well, not really, he replied - we only played in one of them.

Much of this first half played out like something of a collective, recurring nightmare. The kind where you know where it’s going and what lies ahead but there’s just no way of shaking your way out of it. Pass, pass, pass, probe, hit the wall and repeat. Pass, pass, pass, probe and bang: 1-0 down. How exactly did that happen? If this grand old place can every now and then take a little while to stir then it is because this tale is all too familiar.

But stir it did, crowd following team. One suspects the hairdryer treatment is no longer much of a thing in 2024 and the era of the head coach, but Beale said that some ‘honest truths’ were shared in the dressing room. Sunderland were out early for the second half, ready and waiting to put right what had just gone wrong.

What followed was the most vibrant, fluid and exciting half an hour of football this young group have managed not just in Beale’s tenure to date but possibly since that quite remarkable dismantling of Southampton back in early September. The kind of spell that makes you forgive them anything, the kind of spell that makes the occasional growing pains worth enduring. Plymouth Argyle boss Ian Foster was left less than impressed than the standard of officiating on show but even he was the first to hail a ‘wonderful’ display from the Black Cats.

After what has been an often acrimonious start to the year, this was probably the spell and the shot of adrenaline everyone needed. A reminder of how fearless and free-flowing this young team can be, and how exciting the future can often look. Each and everyone of the goals was one to relish, from the opportunistic and crisp strike of Pierre Ekwah to level the scores. The audacious crossfield pass from Trai Hume to spring Jack Clarke free, and everything the winger did thereafter. Perhaps the third goal best summed up how Sunderland rediscovered the verve, a wonderful goal that started with one of Plymouth’s rare forays forward. Morgan Whittaker has been one of the best players in the Championship this season, one of the few equals to his opposite number Clarke, and there were little flashes of that quality here - the through ball that released Ryan Hardie for the opener the most obvious. So there was danger when he drove into the heart of Sunderland’s half, stopped only by a fine recovery run and challenge from Dan Neil. Neil shifted it quickly to Jobe Bellingham, who took flight and just kept going until the ball bounced off the inside of the post and in. If you were to be hyper critical of Plymouth then you might suggest that it would have been an idea for someone, anyone, to try and tackle him but no matter - it was a fine individual strike. Neil and Bellingham were utterly dominant through the second half, the former freed up by Beale and his staff making a slight half-time tweak to better deal with Darko Gyabi and Adam Forshaw. They had snapped into challenges throughout the first half and often came out on top, but now there was space aplenty for Sunderland’s fresh legs to drive into. 

Here really is the challenge for Beale and any coach of this Sunderland group, whose strengths and threats are now well known to opponents across the division. How do you create the space they need without handing the other side an easy route into the game on the break? For Beale, too, there is the key question of how he battles against a young group’s understandable struggle to hit this level of intensity every time they go out onto the pitch and for the full 90 minutes. In the steady progress of Nazariy Rusyn, the quietly excellent start from Leo Hjelde and much more besides, he is beginning to get some answers to the issues that dominated the early stages of his tenure. Yet he was the first here to admit there are still many questions.

They’re the questions which will define where this campaign ends up, but really this was a day to remind everyone that in the end, the football doesn’t matter too much. What most will remember this day for was the show of support Sunderland’s supporters showed Beale and his family at the four-minute mark, one that left the head coach visibly moved both during and after the game. Neither Beale nor the Sunderland support have found it easy to connect in the early stages of his tenure, making this moment all the more tender and poignant. 

Sunderland’s second-half surge, a genuine joy to witness, was a reminder of why this game is the most important of the least important things in life. But never anything more than that.