Tony Mowbray admits his formation change backfired at Rotherham - with Sunderland only starting to look like their usual selves when he changed things in the second half. The Black Cats boss moved away from his preferred 4-2-3-1 shape to a 4-4-2 for the trip to the New York Stadium in an attempt to counter Rotherham's pressing style.
But it did not work and Mowbray acknowledged that the first half performance was sub-standard, as Sunderland went in trailing 1-0 to an Ollie Rathbone goal. Mowbray changed tack at half time but still Rotherham doubled their lead through Shane Ferguson before a triple substitution which saw Patrick Roberts, Trai Hume, and Aji Alese introduced finally made an impact, and Joe Gelhardt halved the deficit.
Mowbray said: "I think you have to give Rotherham some credit for the intensity of their play. I changed the shape a little bit to play slightly differently against their pressure but, ultimately, as you saw, we are better doing what we normally do.
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"When we made the changes and brought some more established players on ... or maybe it was because they were 2-0 up that we got better, I'm not sure. We weren't at the level we would normally play at and that's credit to them, I think."
He added: "We didn't perform at the normal level. A lot of that is down to the intensity they play at.
"It's difficult to play against - I'd liken it to playing against Millwall, to be honest. You know you are playing against a team that plays against the ball very well, who push on lots of men.
"We changed the formation, and there was a logic to that - against a team that presses really high, why would you play around the edge of your own box when they are committing six men to the press? So you don't do it, you play longer, you need more targets forward.
"That's why we changed formation, because of the way they play. But we should have still been better than we were tonigh and the first half, particularly, wasn't good enough.
"Ultimately, it [the change of system] took away our fluency - when we are at our best, we are fluent with the ball, we play through teams and round teams. For the last 20 minutes or half-an-hour or so, we looked more like ourselves."
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