Sunderland's weirdly self-destructive 0-2 defeat against Hull City was not even worth analysing according to manager Gus Poyet.
A ridiculous error by Phil Bardsley and a stupid decision from Wes Brown saw Sunderland play practically the whole game with ten men. Astonishingly, it means that out of the 180 minutes against Hull this season, Sunderland have only had 11 men on the pitch for 50 of them.
It is so farcical that Poyet won't even bother to give it any further thought. After the game, he told told reporters:
It's difficult to analyse, everything was set up to have a good game of football and then after three minutes it became really difficult.
Normally in these games, at the bottom, it is very tight and there is not a lot between the teams even if you have a better day and you are the better team on the pitch, sometimes a deflected shot will win it for you.
Playing 85 minutes with one less it's even more difficult. I'm not going to kill myself analysing the game because it's not worth it.
We can erase this and keep believing. We were good before 3 o'clock today, getting better and a difficult team to play against.
We need to make sure this doesn't affect anything we were doing before.
You can hardly blame him. A whole week's worth of preparation was undone and rendered worthless by a few seconds madness by not one but two senior defenders who should know far better.
Bardsley's back pass was comical and, although put in a horrible position, Brown's decision was beyond stupid. It was the footballing self-preservation equivalent of deciding to go pogo-sticking through a minefield.
Going a goal down in the first 5 minutes and then having the rest of the game to put it right with 11 men on the pitch was the absolute worst case scenario had Brown stayed on his feet and not defended like a rash and irresponsible berk. You try to not savage people too much for mistakes, but a player of his experience should be dealing with that situation with far more rationality.
But it wouldn't be Sunderland if we made it easy on ourselves, would it! Very frustrating.