Sunderland's newfound defensive solidity has given the Black Cats a platform for their play-off challenge, according to Alex Neil. Yesterday's 1-0 win against Gillingham at the Stadium of Light saw the Wearsiders keep their fifth clean sheet in six games, having managed just one shut-out in ten games prior to that sequence.
Neil took over in February, inheriting a side that had kept only nine clean sheets in the league all season, and he immediately set about improving that statistic and Sunderland now have 14 to their name. "It was something that needed fixing," said Neil, whose team is now unbeaten in seven games.
"I spoke about it quite a lot when I first came in because the stats were there, it wasn't an opinion, it was a fact. I think what we've got now is a real platform to go on and win games, and if we can continue that, it'll bode well for us going forward.
"There's only two facets of the game, aren't there? What you do when you've got the ball, and what you do when you don't have it. What you can't be is easy to play against, and let teams score against you, and then not be able to create going the other way.
"At the moment, it's hard for us to break teams down because they’re playing with banks of ten behind the ball, but equally, we're not easy to play against and I don't think teams will look forward to playing against us, which is how I want my team to be represented when they play."
Sunderland had little difficulty in keeping Gillingham at arm's length, but they struggled to fashion clear-cut chances at the other end. And it looked as though they would end up with a second successive goalless draw that would have put a dent in their play-off hopes, until substitute Nathan Broadhead made the breakthrough in the fifth minute of injury time.
The win lifted Sunderland back into the play-off places with six games to go, but Neil admits it was a close-run thing with the goal coming so late in the match. "If we hadn't won, I would have got booed, they [the players] would have got booed, and we would all have been cr*p and been told to do one," he said.
"One hundred percent. That's fine. I understand the job, I understand the expectation, and I've got no issue with it. It is what it is, and I knew that when I took the job. So let's be realistic, if we didn't win, it wouldn't have gone down well."
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