Sunderland ran out comfortable winners against Burnley at the Stadium of Light on Monday night
Sunderland ran out emphatic 3-0 winners on a night where the visitors did not register a single shot on target across the course of the game. Parker said his side were ‘passive’ in every phase of the game and admitted that they never looked like troubling Sunderland.
“I didn't see it coming, certainly off the back of the games we've come out of,” Parker said.
“Maybe it's easy to bring a certain level of performance and a certain level against Man United at home, Liverpool away and Tottenham at home. We just fell way, way short tonight of just the core hard basics of what you need to bring to a game and hence why we come out with never really looking like we were ever going to lay a glove on Sunderland.
“I just felt the game tonight, there's nothing in the game at 0-0. You come into a tough place, there's nothing in the game, real first attack, it's a deflected goal.
“After that, nothing really in the game, they score again and we give ourselves a mountain to climb. Get a control in the game but it didn't look like we remotely wanted to score a goal tonight. Had some nice bits, playing around them, keeping the ball, looking really pretty. The cold hard facts are you need to score goals or at least you need to have an intent about it to score goals.
“I thought overall, like I said, just our general intent about us tonight was way short. Every phase of our game in that sense was poor, set plays really poor.
“Just that real intent and that desire in certain moments, we get into nice areas but it's like as if we were looking for the perfect situation, didn't really get any shots off and just showed a poor side of us tonight. I didn't see this performance coming, certainly where we've come from in terms of performances and the results we picked up. We were way, way short of ever being competitive in this division.
"I don't care who you play, if you're going to fall down where we fell short in terms of a lack of intent in everything we did at times...It looked passive at every phase. For that, you get dealt with what you get dealt with."
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Régis Le Bris delivers verdict on Sunderland win
“It was important to react, to show once again the way we want to play, the ability to press high, to be aggressive, to regain possession,” Le Bris said of Sunderland’s win.
“It was important to threaten the space in behind as well and I think we did really well. Today we created chances, we scored three goals, might have been maybe one or two more, so happy with the response, yeah. Sometimes it's connected with tactical problems. So we spoke a lot this week about the way we defended in the mid-block and I think we were probably a bit too reserved and we tried to change it during the week, to be more aggressive in every phase. And it worked well today, even if sometimes Burnley had the ball. We were not passive, we tried to find the right trigger, to press and when it was possible to jump, we did it. So it gives us energy, power, intensity in every phase.”
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