Sunderland's goalless draw at Charlton Athletic was a game of contradictions. On the one hand, the return of Nathan Broadhead after two-and-a-half months on the sidelines, a positive performance - including a first-half display that Alex Neil described as the best football of his five-game tenure - in which Sunderland dominated possession, created a hatful of chances, and in which they denied the Addicks so much as a single shot on target.
On the other, there was also frustration, disappointment, and misery. Frustration at Sunderland's inability to take their chances, disappointment at two dropped points in the race for a play-off place, and the misery of seeing your most influential player hobble out of the action with an injury that could rule him out of all or part of the run-in.
It says a lot about Alex Pritchard's importance to Sunderland that his injury is potentially more significant than the two points dropped at The Valley. On any other day, the fact that Sunderland had collected only a point from a game they should have won at such a crucial point in the season would have been the takeaway.
