Why there is no glossing over a shocking Sunderland defeat at Peterborough United

Burnley made 10 changes and Sunderland eight, which tells you where the priorities of each club lie but at least it showed Sunderland’s strength-in-depth was just as good as a Premier League teams on the night and that can’t be a bad thing.

Sunderland rode their luck, with Burnley hitting the woodwork twice but their second half performance was superb and they deserved the win.

The Clarets had players like Lennon, Hendrick, Drinkwater, Hart and Rodriguez, all hugely experienced top flight players, so for Sunderland to come out on top was satisfying and the noisey, boisterous away support definitely played their part.

However, three days on, and another eight changes later, it was a completely different story as Sunderland’s supposed first XI crashed to defeat against Peterborough where everything you could possibly think of went wrong including a melt-down at the end.

Don’t be fooled into thinking the two red cards were the reason for the loss, the game was long gone before the two dismissals, all the Peterborough goals were scored while Sunderland had eleven men on the pitch, they just made the defeat more frustrating and the games coming up more difficult because of suspensions.

Leaving the cup win at Turf Moor, I could never see that type of performance or scoreline happening just days later at London Road so what went so badly wrong?

Did the winning run the team was on make the players complacent? It shouldn’t have because Peterborough are a team in form, they beat MK Dons away by four goals in the previous game so they must have known this was going to be a hugely difficult fixture.

Of course it had to be Marcus Maddison who did most of the damage, a reported Sunderland target in the summer, and a Sunderland fan himself, which just makes it feel worse, it had to happen didn’t it?

So Sunderland had a good cup win and a horrible league defeat in the past week but as every Sunderland fan knows promotion this season is everything, so a cup win can’t put any gloss whatsoever on what was a shocker at Peterborough on Saturday.