Inside another Sunderland success and Tony Mowbray's encouraging verdict for supporters

Sometimes, you just aren’t really the story.

Sunderland were good here, and in spells they were very good indeed.

This night, though, was probably first and foremost about Sheffield Wednesday: a grand old club staring down the barrel of a long, bleak winter. 

Winless in eight Championship fixtures, they had come into the contest with manager and senior players urging everyone to stick together. On the morning of the game, their owner Dejphon Chansiri released a statement running to well over 1,000 words, criticising fans criticising his running of the club and threatening to withdraw future funds should it continue. Few stadiums roar like this one at its very best but here the sparse stands at kick off told the tale.

It had somehow got even worse for the Owls in the hours before the game, influential pair Barry Bannan and Josh Windass ruled out through injury.

Yet football often operates with a psychology all of its own and some Sunderland fans wondered whether actually this might all be bad news. After all, Sheffield Wednesday will win a game at some point and so it was tempting to wonder, to fear, whether every setback was merely setting Sunderland up for a bigger fall.

Not a bit of it, and not with this team. They are simply too good, too confident and too composed to spurn an opening this great against a side this poor.

Wednesday were a mess, a reflection of a poor summer of recruitment and a bumpy transition between head coaches. Neither a possession-based side nor a direct one, they struggled to offer any kind of threat. Out of possession it was impossible to say what the plan was, such was their utter passivity. Sunderland took their first two chances and the second perhaps summed it up best. There was serious quality in the goal, both in the switch of play from Mason Burstow and most obviously in the stunning finish from Jack Clarke, and yet the space the latter had been left to roam in was hard to comprehend given his form this season.

The second half was for the most part a non-event, and while Tony Mowbray has urged his players to be more ruthless and more clinical in future, there was an understanding that the drop off was inevitable in the circumstances and particularly with two big challenges lying in wait at the Stadium of Light this week. 

The encouragement for Mowbray is that even without Ross Stewart and even without Amad, Sunderland’s goalscoring capability has proved resilient and that this was the third away game in a row that they have scored three goals underlined that.

In the summer, Mowbray had pushed for striking additions and regularly raised his concern as to how Sunderland would score the 70 goals required to make the play-offs. 

As it stands there has not been a single goal scored by a recognised striker but Clarke is there with seven and all over the pitch players are chipping in - Dan Ballard did not score last season but now two in a matter of weeks. 

The goals from the centre forwards should come eventually, too. Burstow was excellent here, delivering by far his most accomplished display. Mowbray believes Luis Hemir will contribute in time as he finds his feet and there is Nazariy Rusyn and Eliezer Mayenda waiting to make an impact too.

Mowbray believes his team is a better one than he had last season. Whether they can replicate last season’s top-six finish depends of course on the strength of the teams around them and the extent to which that often matchwinning ability of Stewart and Amad is missed.

Yet in terms of their ability to control a game, the evidence here more than backed up Mowrbay’s belief.

Dan Neil embodied that, another display in which he absorbed the pressure of the opposition midfield and picked through them with his passing.

“I think we have the capability to be a better team than last season, I think they believe in how we are asking them to play and they enjoy it,” Mowbray said.

“We have to get to the point where these players self manage and understand that when a player isn’t where they should be when we have a passing opportunity, they adjust themselves. At a certain point they will understand why we have players in certain positions and they won’t need me to scream from the sidelines.

“I think they’re getting there, and of course with young footballers they just play, they play forward and they run and win tackles.

“But football has moved on a lot, Pep [Guardiola] has changed the game with positional football and I think we are a pretty good positional team. We need to keep building those rotations so teams can’t stop us at source, and the players are understanding that even more.”

By the closing stages of this game this was a ground that felt torn between anger and quiet despair, a feeling that anyone associated with Sunderland will remember well. 

It is a painful cycle that Sunderland now look to have moved well beyond. 

Even just a cursory glance at the fixture list for October shows that there are far steeper challenges ahead for Mowbray’s side and that there will be bumpier days and nights than this one is obvious. 

They will face it, though, from a position of strength.