USA TOUR (PART TWO)
- BY BEN HARDIE
- Jul 31
- 2 min read
ALS’s Ben Hardie is still in the US, now he’s sobered up, here’s his thoughts on last night’s game…
Sunderland ventured to New Jersey for game number three of pre season, narrowly losing to Leeds United through some poor defending and even worse goalkeeping. Not a lot happened during the match to be honest however it did see the return of several players who had been so far absent from the squad due to the World Cup.
The only goal of the game happened less than 10 minutes in, with Enzo Le Fee giving the ball away sloppily inside our half and Lukas Nmecha profiting. He fired a long range effort rather poorly towards the goal but it caught out Melker Ellborg who thought it was heading towards the middle of the net initially. Despite having plenty of time to correct himself, the ball went out of reach of the Swedish shot-stopper and it rolled into the far right corner. Ellborg had a bit of an odd game, he had very little to do other than the goal and one close range effort in the second half and he seemed to dawdle in many instances rather than trying to speed play up.
Brian Brobbey had a bit of an incident with Joe Rodon, the former performed a sliding tackle on the latter, which was definitely a foul but waved on by the red, resulting in an off the ball scuffle between the two. Shortly afterwards, the Dutch striker was substituted off but this was planned and not related to what had happened on the pitch. In fact, all of the World Cup returnees played just 30-40 minutes. After Brobbey went off, the game died a death, only really picking up slightly in the last ten minutes or so, Trey Ogunsuyi missing a good chance via a header at one point. Tuterov, who had come on for Brobbey, looked bright but was left effective than in the last two friendlies and Simon Adingra had a good game on the right hand side.
The whole match though could be boiled down to us dominating possession but being unable to do anything dangerous in the final third. Our best players still aren’t up to speed, but will get there, and a couple of them (including the captain) aren’t even back yet so the performance and the defeats aren’t overly concerning. Wrexham will likely be able to outrun us in the next game too, due to it being their last friendly before the beginning of the EFL season, so expect another loss in that one that we can’t read too much into.
