Ross Stewart's injury is 'probably' the difference between Sunderland arriving at the halfway point of the season in a play-off place rather than where they are in midtable, according to Tony Mowbray. Sunderland have had to muddle through for three-and-a-half months without their star striker - and, while on-loan Everton man Ellis Simms was also sidelined, for seven games with no fit centre-forward at all - after Stewart picked up a thigh injury at the beginning of September.
The Scotland international, who scored 26 goals last season to power the Black Cats to promotion, had scored five goals in the first seven games prior to his injury, and picked up where he left off at the weekend as he made his comeback from the bench and scored in the 1-1 draw at Hull City. Going into Christmas, Sunderland are 12th in the table at the midway point of the season with only four points standing between them and a place in the top six.
And Mowbray, who took over on Wearside at the end of August, believes that had Stewart stayed fit his goal tally would already be in double figures and that would have garnered the Black Cats more points. "I don't know how many games I've had here, but I know that for the vast majority of games we have had no strikers," said Mowbray as he reflected on the first half of the campaign.
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"How's the journey going? About as well as might have thought or hoped. How well would it have gone with a fully-fit Ross Stewart? Would Ross be in double figures for goals now and would he have given us a lot more points?
"Maybe. Probably. But I don't know. What I do know is that we have found other ways to score goals and win matches along the way. I know Ellis is fit now, but he wasn't [able to start] for eight, nine, or ten games, and we had to try and find a way.
"It depends how closely you want to look at the season. Generally people don't [look at it closely], they just look at the points and the games played and that's fine, you have to accept that and live with it because you build a squad through the summer and then you have to get on with it. This club built a squad with two strikers, but unfortunately both of those strikers got injured for a long period."
Injuries notwithstanding, Mowbray has been pleased with what he has seen in the first half of the season from the squad he inherited. He said: "I think the group of players is doing well, I think they are working really hard.
"I talk about growth and wanting to get better, and their mindset is that they want to listen and go down the road we are showing them - that's all you can ask of them, really.
"If you've got the world's best players, you can put them in a formation and let them play and they will generally win because their talent is too good for the opposition, but in this league there seem to be a lot of teams of similar quality and it might be the camaraderie or fighting attitude or occasionally the individual class or talent of one player that can win a game."
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