Premier League Match Review: Sunderland vs. Birmingham City
Sunderland and Birmingham started off their new league seasons with an interesting and an eventful match that took place at the Stadium of Light. Sunderland finished lower than Birmingham in last season’s Premier League, something that was not at all expected before the start of the 2009-2010 season.
Sunderland approached the match in positive fashion under their manager Steve Bruce, as they played with a conventional 4-4-2. Black cats deployed Frazier Campbell and Darren Bent upfront as their two strikers. In the midfield, Cattermole took up the defensive responsibilities and Henderson, Muhammadi and Malbranque supported the two strikers from offensive positions.
In the Sunderland defence, Richardson played out of position as a right back while Mensah, Bramble and Onuoha took their respective positions in central defence and left back respectively. Foster was in goal for Birmingham and Mignolet took his place in between the posts for Sunderland.
Sunderland started the match much better than Birmingham City as only in the fifth minute of the match, Foster almost made a costly error in front of the Birmingham goal. In the tenth minute of the match, Sunderland almost opened the scoring as Richardson’s finely played cross found its way via Bent to Malbranque, but the French man’s shot failed to trouble Ben Foster.
The first controversial moment of the match came around the twentieth minute mark as Carr’s foul on Campbell caused the referee to blow for a penalty and Birmingham’s defender was also shown a yellow card. There were moans all around the stadium as the fans clearly thought that the foul took place outside the penalty area rather than inside it. Bent stepped up to the spot to dispatch the penalty kick into the bottom left corner to give Sunderland a one nil lead in the twenty second minute of the match.
Cattermole, Sunderland’s aggressive defensive midfielder became the second player to get booked in the match after his late challenge on Birmingham’s target man Jerome. Rest of the first half was dominated by Sunderland but in the forty second minute of the match, Cattermole was booked again by the referee and this time for a tackle from behind on Lee Bowyer. The two yellow cards turned to one red card as a result and Sunderland were reduced to ten men for the rest of the match.
At half time, Sunderland were leading Birmingham by one goal to nil and soon Birmingham’s agony was compounded through an own goal which was scored by no one other than Carr. In the first ten minutes of the second half, at the fifty fifth minute mark, Bent’s aerial tackle on Carr forced the veteran defender into a backwards header which ended up in the Birmingham goal past the despairing Ben Foster.
At the fifty eighth minute mark, Zigic was introduced into the game for Birmingham in place of O’Connor and he almost immediately made an impact as his shot on the sixty third minute of the match produced a fine save out of Mignolet. Birmingham soon came back into the match through Dann’s goal in the seventy sixth minute of the match.
Bent was substituted for Wellbeck after eighty three minutes of the match had passed. In the dying minutes of the match, Birmingham pushed on and got their equalizing goal in the eighty eighth minute of the match as Ridgewell got the last touch on the ball after a messy goal mouth scramble. Birmingham did try to score a winner in the injury time but failed to do so. Thus the final score of the match was two all as both the teams gained a point each from their first league match of the season.
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