What a strange feeling.
Despite spending the week looking rather optimistically ahead to the visit of Nottingham Forest to Sunderland on Friday night, the game was over by half time as we shipped four goals and then conceded another in the second period – the heaviest defeat we’ve suffered in a very long time.
I honestly never saw that level of performance coming from us. That said, you've got to give Forest a lot of credit because they were excellent, though we certainly didn't help ourselves and just didn't look like a side motivated to finish in the top eight, which hurts a lot.
We've now conceded nine goals in our last two games, and the manager and the players have got to address this when we play Wolves at the weekend. I know they’re already down, but they’re not completely useless and have achieved some alright results over the last few months, so we’ve got to be careful. Anything less than a victory will be looked upon as a bad result and could have a massive impact on next season and how we recruit, because while a win would keep us in the conversation for Europe, a defeat would probably have us feeling like our season is already over.
I don't mean to be too negative here, but what we saw on Friday night just wasn't acceptable, and the players owe the fans a performance. Granit Xhaka said in his post on Instagram that the focus would turn to putting things right – and I'm sure that has been the case – but we can only quantify that with results and performance levels, and the group now have to prove their doubters wrong at Wolves' Molineux Stadium this weekend.
Find more from Gavin Henderson at Roker Report
