Luke O’Nien has issued a brutal verdict on Sunderland’s performance against Blackburn Rovers yesterday.
Luke O’Nien returned to the starting line-up against Cardiff City following his suspension last week, picking up his first clean sheet since New Year’s Day.
With Blackburn Rovers hovering above the relegation zone, Sunderland were offered a brilliant opportunity to pick up back-to-back wins and really kick off a positive end to the campaign.
However, a number of individual errors and an all-round pathetic performance saw O’Nien’s side concede five goals on home soil – only the third time they have done so at the Stadium of Light.
According to sofascore, O’Nien was one of Sunderland’s worst performers yesterday, but he wasn’t afraid to call out his side’s ‘unacceptable’ display on Easter Monday.
Sunderland can’t ‘forget’ this dismal display
Speaking to the Sunderland Echo, O’Nien said: “I had to have a little bit of time after the game to decompress a little bit, emotions, anger, a lot of emotions were there at the end of it.
“People might say it’s one to forget, I think it’s far from that. I think it’s one to remember, one to use and one to motivate. One to never happen again.
“We have to dissect that, it’s chalk and cheese from the weekend. When you have a performance that bad there is so much to take from it that we will.
“There’s just initial disappointment and embarrassment because we let ourselves down, let Doddsy down. He gave us all the information we needed and to not do the non negotiables of running harder, not looking after the ball. If you don’t do that in any game we’ve got no chance. I know he will get the brunt of it but as players, myself, we have to take responsibility.”
How did we endure such a decline since Friday?
Sunderland put on their best performance in months last week as they beat Cardiff City, so it is absolutely baffling to see how much they were able to crumble just days later.
There wasn’t a single positive performance out of yesterday’s team, while I lost count at how many times we needlessly gave the ball away.
It was hardly like Blackburn played brilliantly either. I was impressed with Sammie Szmodics and Tyrhys Dolan, but we didn’t exactly make it difficult for them to get past our defence either.
While the players were very poor, results like that just make it very clear that Mike Dodds is not a manager and shouldn’t be expected to take charge of this team. If we had someone who knew what they were doing then they would have known exactly how to get this team to pick up where they left off against Cardiff, rather than act like they had never kicked a football before.
But these are the kind of things we have been saying over and over again for weeks now. We already know how much of a mess the club is and all we really want is the season to be over.