Sunderland manager Sam Allardyce was left feeling bemused as his side threw away a point at Goodison Park today in a 6-2 defeat on Merseyside. Goals from Jermain Defoe and Steven Fletcher either side of half-time brought the Black Cats level after Everton had cemented a two-goal lead. Everton ran away with the game in the second half, with Arouna Kone bagging a hat-trick and Romelu Lukaku proving a handful.
Questions will be asked of Sam Allardyce’s system with a 3-5-2 formation being used and simply not working. Whilst many individuals may have played themselves out of the team such as Wes Brown and Costel Pantilimon.
“We’ve thrown away an opportunity to feel good this weekend,” said Allardyce, speaking to safc.com . “We went behind when we really shouldn’t have done, clawed our way to 2-2 and then, for me, that’s when we should have been at least coming off with a point today.
“If Everton had scored a wonder goal you can say ‘there’s not a lot we can do about that’, but the last four goals were all stoppable by us and there was nothing brilliant about Everton’s play.”
He continued: “We became so open and so easy to play through. We seemed to get carried away by the euphoria of getting the equaliser and we had really good opportunities to get 3-2 up, but instead of taking one we’ve left the backdoor open to Everton to make it look like an extremely easy win.
“That’s a lack of understanding of where you’re playing who you’re playing against. You’ve got to keep emotional control and you play at this level via the intelligence you’ve got – ability is all well and good but if you don’t have the intelligence with it at this level you lose control.
“All the lads are looking around saying ‘what’s happened’. They’ve let it happen, not because of Everton’s play but because they’ve lost their discipline out of possession, and that’s a great shame because like I said at 2-2 it was looking comfortable for us and we should of just protected that.”
