Sunderland Football Club News

• Nickname:Black Cats
• Founded:1879
• Manager:Martin O'Neill

• Ground:Stadium of light
• Capacity:48,353

Whitehead upbeat despite loss

29 Sep 2008 - 15:51:34

Click To Enlarge

Sunderland captain Dean Whitehead believes Roy Keane's side are now as good as Aston Villa, even though the Black Cats were beaten 2-1 by the Midlanders at the weekend.

Sunderland actually led early on thanks to Djibril Cisse's goal but eventually had to return to the north-east with nothing to show for their efforts.

Whitehead told the Sunderland Echo: "The lads are down because we believe we should have got something out of that game.

"Aston Villa are a good side and they were playing at home but I'm sure neutrals would say that there wasn't a great deal of difference between the two sides.

"Their two free-kicks have been the difference for them but generally I thought we matched them.

"We played well and scored a good goal and it was a pretty even game but they've managed to score from two free-kicks and that's really annoying for us because we'd spoken about that beforehand.

"We knew all about how dangerous Villa can be from free-kicks so that was something we were looking to avoid as much as possible.

"You can't help but give free-kicks away in games at times but the two we conceded were poor ones and unfortunately we paid the price for that."