Tony Mowbray insists he must 'find a way' to keep Sunderland scoring during Ross Stewart's absence - whether that means changing personnel, system, or both. The Black Cats expect to be without their top scorer for between six and eight weeks after he suffered a torn thigh muscle in the warm-up ahead of Monday's defeat at Middlesbrough, which meant he had to pull out of the game at short notice.
Stewart's 26 goals powered Sunderland's promotion from League One last season, and he had started the current campaign in excellent form having scored five times in seven outings. The Scot scored twice in Mowbray's first game in charge against Rotherham United last week, but now the new head coach will have to find a way to cope without him.
"We had a little bit of this at Blackburn last year with Ben Brereton Diaz," said the former Ewood Park boss. "He scored 21 goals before Christmas, then he missed 12 [games] and we couldn't win a game without his goals.
READ MORE: Sunderland's game against Millwall postponed after Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II passes away
"But you stay a football manager because you find a way to win games, generally. If you don't win football matches, you are not a manager for very long. We've lost our main goalscoring threat so we have to find a goalscoring threat within what we have got.
"The [transfer] window isn't open, but I think we have got enough talent in our team and I just need to get into the heads of some of them that they need to play a bit further forward, they need to shoot more, they have to get into the box and run more without the ball which is a bit foreign to some of them because they like to get it, move it, and pass it about. It's hard to change the habits of a lifetime, particularly for the likes of [Alex] Pritchard and [Patrick] Roberts who have been doing what they do for a long time.
"They are technical players who shift you off-balance and play passes in around the corner, they are not running and sprinting in behind you and bashing it in the net. It's hard to change what they have done throughout their careers, but we have to find a way."
Stewart had formed an effective partnership with on-loan Everton frontman Ellis Simms, but now Simms - who has scored three goals in seven games - will have a different role to play as the club's only out-and-out centre-forward. "It'll come down to how we are going to play," said Mowbray.
"Ellis has done so well, he needs to be in the team and we needed to play twin strikers [when Stewart was fit]. It was a threat to every defence in this league in my mind.
"Now, there's no reason why you can't play with one striker and lots of little, clever, players behind him to try and service him but also to try get into the box and score themselves. We'll try to find the answer to how we play, and if we win and score lots of goals then we will probably have got it right, if we're struggling to score and playing alright, we will have to try find the answer.
"I hope I'm not going to be sitting here every week and blaming the fact that Ross Stewart isn't playing because we haven't won. If I am, I'm sure you'll remind me of that first week when Ross got injured and I said we'd have to find a way - you haven't been able to."
When Stewart pulled out of the warm-up at the Riverside Stadium, Roberts was quickly drafted into the starting XI and that meant Sunderland's gameplan had to be rewritten on the fly just minutes before kick-off. Mowbray admits that was difficult, not only because the change came so late, but also because he had had less than a week working with the players to get his ideas across.
But, given time, he is confident that this group of players will be as tactically flexible as the squad he left behind at Blackburn. He said: "It's not as though I have been in here for four or five years, as I had been at Blackburn, when I could change the system just like that because for six months we'd been playing with a back three but for the previous six or ten months with a back four, we'd play one striker, we'd play three strikers.
"So when I changed there was no 'what's this?' or panic, they just did it. I've only been here for a week and a half, so it's hard for me to change everything straightaway.
"I'm really watching and seeing who reacts to change. Nobody likes change, really, it's difficult to take."
Sunderland's game against Millwall at the Stadium of Light tomorrow has been postponed in the wake of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, with all games in the Premier League and EFL called off as a mark of respect. That would mean that Wednesday's game at Reading would now be the Black Cats' next outing, although there has been no confirmation as yet that the midweek fixtures will go ahead as the country is currently in a period of national mourning.
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