Proper media outlets might wax lyrical about the 1973 cup final, but not me. Instead I’ve continued to sift through Leeds performances looking for positivity like an Old West prospector looking for gold in buckets of mud. In short, I haven’t found any gold, but I didn’t drop my phone in the mud either.

Calling Sunderland a Premiership team is a lot like calling us a Championship side; neither are really doing much to assure fans that they’ll still be there next season. Sunderland sitting just 3 points above relegation and Leeds so close it’s almost worth getting a new coat bought in preparation for the breezy League One grounds we’ll need to visit. Both sides struggling to score this was not likely to be a classic. And a classic it wasn’t.

Turbo-summary

Simon Grayson was in the away end, what a guy

We played a very rotated side

Sunderland played a fairly rotated side too

First half was dire

We didn’t score an own goal though

Second half was better

We still couldn’t score

A very rotated side

Neil Redfearn did the right thing here, in my opinion. We have a duty of care to the younger players to not over-expose and nurture them, so this was the opportunity to take players like Byram, Cook, Adryan and Mowatt and give them a week off. Adryan being the only one to feature – but was subbed off during the second half.

Instead we saw starts for Del Fabro, Brian the Paraguayan, Sloth, Taylor, Murphy, Berardi and Austin. Each with a point to prove:

Del Fabro – with our defense still leaky, there’s always going to be a chance for players to claim a place

Montenegro – pacey and dangerous at times, worth a match to see if he can offer us something

Sloth – a slick passer of the ball when I’ve seen him play, but behind Cook/Mowatt/Bianchi/Adryan in first team terms. Needed to show something.

Taylor – I firmly believe he’ll be our first choice left back next season. Needs to start coming in to the first team – much better at LB than Berardi.

Berardi – an awful liability, but important to rest Byram and see if this Swiss International can make a point

Austin – on the edge of being loaned out, it seems. Unplayable on his day, but those days are few and far between – needs to show much more.

So it was nice to see a heavily rotated squad.

Performance

I could largely paste any match report into this region now, because the summary has been said so many times before. “Defensively lacking, conceded, looked brighter after the break but still couldn’t score”.

The first half was dreadful; Sunderland pressed, Leeds cleared their lines and failed to break out meaning a goal was inevitable. In games where we’re penned in to our half it doesn’t matter how many times you clear the ball, we know it’s coming straight back. With this Leeds side, if you hit enough balls into our defense a goal will come. Either we’ll gift you one or score it ourselves, so entering the second half 1-0 down wasn’t unexpected. The fact it was only 1 was a positive for most fans, it seemed.

The second half we were much better, with Adryan, Montenegro and Antenucci linking up nicely and almost leveling the match in the first 90 seconds. Liam Cooper (who had an okay match, as it goes) hit the post, but otherwise Leeds failed to exert any meaningful pressure on Sunderland. We could have knicked an equaliser, but ultimately a 1-0 loss is fair I think.

Statistics

The stats support my argument that a 1-0 loss is fair. Sunderland had 61% possession, 11 shots (8 on target) and 10 corners. We had 39% possession, 7 shots (3 on target) and 4 corners. In short, we were second best and finished second. No shame in that.

This wasn’t a game where we were robbed (even if a fairly obvious penalty decision was turned down, only to realise it was the correct decision on the replay), Leeds just weren’t as good as Sunderland and we lost the match. Traditional football.

Problems at Leeds

This was yet another match where I sarcastically tweeted:

Leeds in "this could go on all day and we'd still not score" shocker #lufc — I Hate Leeds (@ihatelufc) January 4, 2015

But that’s just how we’ve been lately. Derby was the same, the match could have gone on for hours and we’d still not register a meaningful shot on goal. Against Sunderland we had a few chances, but nothing you’d truly call “nailed on” or “a sitter”. Nor did we create chance after chance; we created very little and finished none of them – but this is a habit now.

That means we’ve played something like 306 minutes since our last goal (a penalty against Forest) and something like 482 minutes since our last goal from open play. That’s 8 hours of football without a goal from open play and 5 hours without a goal at all.

Not that we expect to visit Premiership teams and win anymore, but we’ve only scored twice since November which hardly lends itself to beating anyone, let alone teams like Sunderland.

At the end of the day, the FA Cup doesn’t matter to me or to Leeds. We’re in a worrying league position, we don’t need additional matches and distractions, we need to focus on the task in hand which is building a winning side. I’m not sad or disappointed about this match in particular, more that it was yet another game where we’ve failed to score.

Sunderland don’t mean anything to me personally, losing to them (however mediocre they are) feels much like losing a friendly against any non-rival. Bolton next week is an enormous fixture for us though, with Neil talking about getting some players in it’s really time to start winning matches and distancing ourselves from the bottom. Until we start scoring that won’t happen, though.

I miss talking about Leeds being the cheeky underdog toppling top teams as we stride up the Football League, whereas now I’m just thankful that we lost to Sunderland rather than Dover – because one is a smaller headline than the other and we’d have lost both matches. Happy 2015.

Christ.