What Tony Mowbray feels 'talented’ Abdoullah Ba needs to improve as Sunderland boss looks for right balance

The Black Cats beat Birmingham 2-1 in their final match before the World Cup break, with the side bouncing back from a 1-0 defeat by Cardiff the previous week.

Mowbray handed 19-year-old Abdoullah Ba his first Sunderland start against Cardiff, as experienced players such as Corry Evans and Alex Pritchard dropped out of the starting XI.

"The balance for me at this club at the moment is how many attacking players I put in the team and how many defensive minds I put in the team,” said Mowbray ahead of the Birmingham game.

“I know the team want to be a front-foot, high-pressing football team that plays with energy and gets the crowd going, and yet the communication can be an issue. I don’t want to lay any blame or burden on anybody because I think Abdoullah Ba is a wonderful talented footballer and (Amad) Diallo is a wonderful player as we’ve all seen.

“Diallo’s physical data the last few games has been the best, all the sprint distances, high intensity distances, distance covered, he is up there with everyone else in the team and beyond them, most of them.

“It’s not the running or the lack of work, it’s the detail of when do you mark such and such a player.

“I spent a bit of time with Abdoullah telling him that he had to be good out of possession in this game because this Cardiff team were a team that could pick through you, they have rotations, unlike Cardiff teams of the last four or five years where they have been very direct and have big centre-halves and a big centre-forward.

“He almost took it too literally of marking men and getting rotated into positions that allowed other people to rotate. As you saw they played through us too easily in the first half and it was really only the communication in the team.”

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After a week off Sunderland are now preparing for a warm-weather training camp in Dubai during the World Cup break, where they’ll play a friendly match against Saudi Arabian side Al-Shabab.

The break should provide Mowbray some valuable time on the training pitch to work with his squad, following a congested Championship schedule in the first half of the campaign.

“I don’t think the environment has allowed lots of coaching because literally there is a game every three days,” added Mowbray. “Modern day football you are always post one, post two, pre one, pre two, game day.

“Players have got a mentality that they are tired and we have to just give them a cool down, it’s very difficult to get the core working of a football team in the middle of a season.”

Sunderland’s season will resume on Saturday, December 3 when they host Millwall at the Stadium of Light.

The Black Cats then have fixtures against West Brom, Hull, Blackburn and Wigan before the end of December.