Sunderland’s players are unlikely to forget Monday 28 April anytime soon. The squad were in Portugal, settling into a pre-playoff training camp, when the lights went out as one of Europe’s biggest power cuts plunged the Iberian peninsula into chaos.
Although Régis Le Bris made light of the inconvenience and emphasised that the Algarve sunshine had been “re-energising”, no one is quite sure whether he has managed to fix his team’s own worrying electrical faults. There was certainly no sign of a backup generator kicking into action and restoring the attacking power as Sunderland returned from the Atlantic coast to lose 1-0 to QPR at the Stadium of Light last Saturday. It was their fifth straight defeat.
