Sunderland 0-5 Nottingham: Premier League Match Report

Sunderland 0-5 Nottingham was four goals down at half-time. The interval read 0-4 and the second period 0-1 — a home side taken apart inside 45 minutes by a team ten points below them in the table, and the heaviest result of the round by some margin.

Sunderland were 11th on 46 points from 33 matches with a goal difference of -4, a promoted side who had spent the season comfortably clear of trouble. They arrived having lost 3-4 at Aston Villa in their previous match, which followed three wins in four — 1-0 at Leeds, 2-1 at Newcastle, 1-0 over Tottenham. Four conceded at Villa Park in a single afternoon, after a run in which they had been giving up one a game.

Nottingham were 16th on 36 with -9, five points above the relegation places and coming off a 4-1 win over Burnley. Their five preceding results contained three draws and two wins, one of them 3-0 at Tottenham, and had lifted them from a position that looked genuinely dangerous in March. Sunderland had won the reverse fixture 1-0 at the City Ground in September.

Nottingham moved to 39 points and a goal difference improved to -4, eight points clear of the bottom three with four rounds left and a goal difference that had gone from -12 to -4 in two matches. Nine goals scored and one conceded across those two matches transformed the tiebreak position of a side who had looked like relegation candidates a month earlier.

Sunderland stayed on 46 with the difference falling to -9. Nothing in their season was at stake and nothing was lost by it, beyond the record: nine goals conceded in the two matches that closed out their April. For a promoted club, 46 points in late April is an unqualified success, and one afternoon in which the defence disappeared entirely does not alter that. It does explain why they were 11th and not higher.

Our pre-match call was Under 2.5 Goals at 1.80. It lost inside the first half, and the evidence against it was in the previous round: Sunderland had just been involved in a 4-3 at Aston Villa, and Nottingham had just won 4-1. Two teams coming off seven-goal and five-goal matches respectively is not the raw material for a low total. We built the case on Sunderland's earlier run of 1-0s and on the 1-0 in the reverse fixture, which described a version of this team that had stopped existing two weeks earlier. Verdict: lost