Wigan Athletic 1, Sunderland 0

Nov 30 2009 by Stuart Rayner, The Journal

PAUL Scharner’s latest bizarre hairstyle divides his head down the middle, the left half dyed blond, the remainder jet black.

It makes the Wigan Athletic player look like two totally different people depending where you view him from.

Much the same can be said of the Sunderland team he played against at the weekend.

Watch them from the comfort of their Stadium of Light home and you will see a skilful, aggressive side which looks cut out for Europa League qualification if not better. They can be almost as impressive away to the Premier League’s biggest clubs. But watch them from any of the division’s less glamorous stadia and they look more like the Black Cats teams which have spent the last two seasons fighting relegation.

Against the equally inconsistent Wigan, Sunderland’s passing was too frenetic, their control poor.

In their desire to get the ball forward quickly they seemed to forget that precision is vital when playing with just one striker. Some of their defending was lamentable, never more so than in the laughable attempts to stop Hugo Rodallega scoring the only goal of a low-quality game.

At full-time it seemed as though the only people wearing red and white to emerge with any credit were the near-5,000 fans who travelled from Wearside. Sunderland’s supporters raise their game away from home, and they gave the players magnificent backing they did not deserve but clearly needed. But even their copybook was blotted when it later emerged via Darren Bent’s Twitter page that the striker’s mother had been racially abused by a visiting fan.

Bent’s tweeted warning – “The offender needs to hope I don’t find out who he is” – ended the day on a suitably angry tone. Two Black Cats had been booked for dissent, players bickered among themselves on the field, and manager Steve Bruce had very definitely switched tack from defending his team’s away performances in Thursday’s pre-match Press conference.