On this day in 2014, Sunderland utterly collapsed away to Southampton in the Premier League and slumped to an 8-0 defeat for the fourth and (hopefully) final time in our history.
The scoreline suggests that we were a woeful team at the time this game was played, but that’s not really true. There wasn’t much to suggest we’d be able to come away with all three points, Southampton sat in third prior to kickoff and Ronald Koeman had been deservedly rewarded with Manager of the Month for September 2014, but we had just defeated Stoke City 3-1 at home and had only lost once in our opening seven league fixtures. We weren’t pushovers clearly and a draw wouldn’t have been an awful prediction. This was reflected in Koeman’s pre match comments when he said:
“It will be difficult because Sunderland are strong opponents with a good defence and organisation.”
Praising our defensive work seemed a bit silly very quickly however as the home team took the lead through one of the best (or worst?) own goals the English top flight has probably ever seen. Santiago Vergini attempted to clear the ball away from an oncoming attacker and his half-volley curled around Vito Mannone and into the bottom right corner of the goal. Not a great start after 12 minutes.
Graziano Pellè made it two only six minutes later. Southampton intercepted the ball following a poor pass from Jórdi Gomez and Steven Davis passed across the face of goal for Pellè to tap it home. Pellè was having a wonderful time of things personally, he had scored the winner for Italy in a Euro 2016 qualifier on his international debut just five days before this and had been named the Premier Player of the Month for September 2014 as well.
Some nice work from Duŝan Tadić made our day even more miserable with under ten minutes of the first half remaining as he got into the penalty area and whipped a cross towards an oddly unmarked Jack Cork who’s shot just about got the better of Mannone to make it 3-0.
Logically, if you’re 3-0 down at the interval, you have some problems. And so, logically, Gus Poyet decided to make a change to the backline, bringing off Wes Brown for Liam Bridcutt. Almost cruelly though, this seemed to backfire just beyond the hour mark. Mannone made a save to prevent a Pellè effort but he couldn’t get a grip on the ball and it drifted underneath him. Bridcutt had positioned himself behind our goalkeeper, which seemed a smart move given that Mannone hadn’t been able to keep a hold of the ball. For some reason however, Briductt seemed to not be expecting this potential outcome despite his proactive positioning and when the ball made contact with his legs he didn’t react for a second or two and this allowed it to roll painfully over the line. 4-0.
Once again Southampton found another goal within six minutes of the last one. Tadić played in Pellè and the Italy international aimed for the far corner and successfully hit his target. It was now 5-0 with 69 minutes gone and you’d think Southampton might look to wind things down a bit and conserve energy but unfortunately for us, they decided not to do this whatsoever.
After earning himself two assists it was perhaps only fair that Tadić got a goal for himself. John O’Shea passed to Mannone and our goalkeeper woefully attempted to clear the ball as we were under some pressure. It was more like a simple pass than a booted clearance and it went straight to the Serbian who had a go from well outside the box, our goalie really should have done better with it, and made it six goals to nil.
60 seconds hadn’t even passed following this and Southampton had a seventh. Tadić once again got the assist and Wanyama’s powerful effort resulted in the goal. The afternoon was capped off with a massively unwanted trifecta of own goals from us. Sadio Mané attempted to capitalise on a pass into the danger area and Patrick van Aanholt was attempting to stop him from doing this. Mané got there and it deflected off of our Dutch defender for number eight.
For our record books, it is the joint-biggest (and most recent biggest) defeat in our history. We’ve also lost 8-0 against Sheffield Wednesday (1911), West Ham United (1968) and Watford (1982). Southampton have since gone on to lose by nine goals to nil on two separate occassions, away to Manchester United and at home to Leiecester City (the biggest away win in Premier League history) if that's any consolation.
Our manager called it his “most embarrassing game”. Poyet would be dismissed in March 2015, with us sat 17th in the table. His replacement, Dick Advocaat, successfully steered us towards survival and we finished in 16th. The Saints ended the season in seventh, one position higher than the campaign before and got themselves into the Europa League qualifiers.
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