Before kick-off Portsmouth’s manager, John Mousinho, suggested all the pressure would be on Sunderland, leaving his players free to relax, improvise and unlock their inner creativity.
It did not quite work out like that but, in one sense, Mousinho was correct. As the final whistle approached Régis Le Bris’s team frequently looked so nervous, or perhaps simply fatigued, that a relegation-threatened Portsmouth side reduced to 10 men by Marlon Pack’s 67th-minute sending off, could conceivably have snatched a late point.
Instead Wilson Isidor’s early goal proved just sufficient to preserve Sunderland’s unbeaten home record in a Championship they hope to exit this spring. “We’ve had a lot of games in a short spell,” said Le Bris. “So this one wasn’t easy, we struggled and with many big chances missed the game was open until the end.”
If half the second tier still retains feasible hopes of reaching the Premier League through the playoffs, the race for automatic promotion looks slightly less opaque. With only three points separating the top four but nine dividing Le Bris’s fourth-placed side from fifth-placed Middlesbrough, Leeds, Burnley, Sheffield United and Sunderland seem locked into an engrossing struggle to finish first or second. The latter’s cause was aided as, perhaps taking Mousinho’s “relax” message too literally, Portsmouth turned so laid-back they had no answer to a slick seventh-minute Sunderland counterattack that concluded with Eliezer Mayenda’s pass prefacing Isidor placing a shot beyond Nicolas Schmid.
If Schmid beat himself up for having strayed way too far off his line, Le Bris’s decision to persist with the 4-4-2 formation that proved the platform for a new year victory against Sheffield United here seemed vindicated. Even better, Isidor’s eighth goal of the season suggested that maybe the acquisition of a new centre-forward is maybe not quite the pressing January priority it once appeared.
Although the snow that blanketed much of the north-east on Sunday morning had been replaced by heavy rain, the enduring chill dictated that keeping warm remained the imperative for the, in the circumstances, impressive 39,846 crowd.
On a day when many home fans struggled to reach the Stadium of Light hats should be raised to the small band of Portsmouth fans who completed the arduous, and expensive, 340-mile road trip north.
Others had taken three trains to be here while some flew to Newcastle from Southampton airport but all must have feared the worst when Ryley Towler cleared a Patrick Roberts volley off the line and then Schmid redeemed himself by saving superbly to deny Adil Aouchiche.
Despite Josh Murphy dodging Dan Neil and sending a shot swerving and dipping over Anthony Patterson’s bar, Portsmouth frequently rode their defensive luck.
Before half-time alone Mousinho’s team variously escaped an albeit slightly ambitious appeal for a penalty when Towler felled Mayenda in the area, saw the Zenit Saint Petersburg loanee Isidor have a second goal disallowed for a tight offside and Mayenda miss a sitter.
Portsmouth’s No 9, Colby Bishop, had been rendered anonymous but early in the second half he escaped the game’s margins to head narrowly over the bar as Sunderland began losing concentration.
Despite the home substitute Dennis Cirkin having a penalty appeal rejected following Zak Swanson’s challenge, Le Bris’s players started forfeiting possession far too cheaply and turning ponderous on the ball, permitting Portsmouth to close them down too easily. With even Jobe Bellingham looking too tired to speed up their passing and Patterson becoming unusually indecisive, Mousinho’s hopes of a point must have risen.
If so, such optimism swiftly seemed a cruel chimera as the referee sent Pack packing, showing Portsmouth’s captain a straight red card for grabbing a piece of Isidor’s shirt and dragging down the accelerating forward. Given that, without Pack’s intervention – made as he dawdled over a clearance, permitting his opponent to seize possession – Isidor would have been clean through Portsmouth could have no complaints.
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Paradoxically it galvanised Mousinho’s team, setting up a nervy finale that saw a Sunderland team with a nasty habit of conceding late, game-changing, goals wobble alarmingly as the visiting loanee substitute Rob Atkinson shone and increasingly edgy home fans implored the referee to blow his whistle.
Although Portsmouth remain on the brink of the bottom three Mousinho seemed suitably encouraged. “There’s definitely positivity in the changing room,” he said. “I thought we played really well against a really good side with quality all over the pitch. We took Sunderland to the wire.”
