I’d rather play Blues than Stoke – Cats star

Oct 31 2008 by Luke Edwards, The Journal

THEY are widely believed to be the pretenders to the Premier League crown, but Sunderland captain Dean Whitehead has argued he would rather face an away game at Chelsea than Stoke.

Having sampled the euphoria of a derby win over Newcastle last weekend, the Black Cats were brought crashing back down to earth at the Britannia Stadium on Wednesday as they buckled under the pressure of the Potters’ aerial bombardment.

So lifeless was Sunderland’s display in the 1-0 defeat that manager Roy Keane insisted it was comfortably their worst performance of the season so far – and his captain, Whitehead, can not disagree.

However, having found it difficult to get the ball on the ground to play their usual passing game at Stoke, Whitehead is looking forward to playing against a rather more attractive side in Chelsea this weekend.

“It can be hard to play your own game when you come up against a team like Stoke,” said Whitehead, who was beaten in the air by Ricardo Fuller for Stoke’s winner.

“We didn’t pass the ball anything like as well as we can do, and I think that’s because, at various stages of the evening, we got ourselves wrapped up in their game.

“When the ball is up in the air all the time, it’s hard not to fall into the trap of playing too many long balls yourself.

“I think that’s partly what happened. The Chelsea game will be different, but it’s

another match where we know that questions will be asked of us defensively.

“In a strange kind of way, it might be easier for us to play against Chelsea than it was against Stoke. It certainly might be easier for us to concentrate on playing our own game.

“We all know what Stoke are about, and that can make it hard to focus on what you’re doing. Chelsea are different. They’ll come at us and look to play football, and that might allow us to get the ball down ourselves and play on the break.

“Sometimes, it’s easier to play against a team that wants to play football against you than it is to face a side who are knocking it long at every opportunity.”

Nevertheless, although Whitehead is no fan of Stoke’s direct style, he did not begrudge them victory as he admitted the Black Cats were well off the pace all evening.

He said: “They’re a big side and they play to their strengths. I don’t think they strung two passes together all evening. Every time they got it, all they wanted to do was bang it long.

“But you have to be good enough and strong enough to deal with that. We were always going to have to defend for 90 minutes, and we didn’t really do that.

“It was a very disappointing performance. They played a lot of long balls and relied on a lot of throw ins, we switched off for one of them and got punished.”

The defeat has quickly taken the shine off Sunderland’s first Wear-Tyne derby win in 28 years, but Whitehead has urged the players to still travel to Stamford Bridge in a confident mood.

He added: “A lot of the stuff we did against Stoke didn’t really come off, but we’ll have to put that behind us.

“We didn’t play too well and it’s hard to take any positives away from the evening.

“But you have to go places like Chelsea with a bit of confidence, and even though we let ourselves down at Stoke, that’s what we’ll do.

“You can’t sit back and keep on inviting them on to you because, eventually, if you do that, they’ll score. We’ll have to be solid, but we’ll have to show something going forward as well.

“We’re definitely progressing. We took a step back at Stoke, which is very disappointing, but our overall movement is still going forward.”