Tony Mowbray explains his Sunderland starting XI and why he didn't make more subs in Stoke City defeat

Josh Laurent's controversial opener gave Stoke City a slender lead at half time but they broke forward at will in the second, exposing Sunderland's lack of a holding midfielder in Corry Evans' ongoing absence.

Mowbray had made one change to his XI for the game, adding Alex Pritchard into midfield.

The head coach says he has no 'Plan B' in Ross Stewart's absence and while he conceded that he could have gone more direct to try and combat Stoke's counterattacking gameplan, he said that was something which hadn't suited his personnel when he tried it at Rotherham United.

"It was a big discussion point for us," Mowbray said.

"We were fully aware of what they do and how they play, and that was a decision to make. We put Pritchard in, another eight/ten and another clever manipulator of the ball in the hope that we could play through their press and play in the gaps, move the ball through the lines.

"We'd discussed doing what we'd done at Rotherham and QPR and starting with Clarke up top and having some speed at the top end of the pitch, to try and turn them round and play behind their press. I think that would have been a scrappy, scruffy game and sitting here after a 5-1 defeat, maybe we should have played longer and more direct.

"But the 40,000 here might then be thinking, 'what was that, where was our team today?' As I say, in hindsight, maybe we should have gone longer.

"The tactics would undoubtedly, if Ross Stewart was playing down the middle, we would have played longer today. Either off his body or into the channel for him to chase it down and apply pressure, because it would have taken their press out of the equation. They've got nothing to press.

"We're not stupid, we know that - and yet we've got Gelhardt up front at 5 ft 7, Pat Roberts 5ft 6, Jack Clarke who isn't a header of the ball. We don't have that target, so you're at risk of just kicking the ball back to them all game. I don't want to sit here saying it was a terrible game, we don't want to boot it away from our goal. We knew the difficulty of the task today against an experienced, physical side with mobility up front.

"We have to find a way."

Mowbray also explained his decision not to make any substitutions in the second half of the game, after Luke O'Nien and Edouard Michut replaced Aji Alese and Joe Gelhardt at the break.

The head coach opted not to turn to his youthful bench as Stoke City pulled well clear through the second half, and said afterwards that he didn't feel it would have been fair to expose them: "We could have made changes but I'm not sure it would have been right to have put three 18,19-year-old kids on the pitch and expose them at that point.

"You've seen that normally I give them opportunities and that I'm trying to get them used to this division, but I didn't think today was right for that."