Did the international break arrive at the wrong time for Sunderland?

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Gav says...

You want to keep things rocking and rolling after a good win, which is why the timing of the international break probably feels a bit stiff, but I’m fairly happy with it all considering we have so many new players that need to bed in and get themselves acclimatised.

At some point soon the schedule is about to get relentless and we’ll be playing Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday, Tuesday... so I don’t think we should get too far ahead of ourselves.

The players have had a pretty hectic first month, and there’s been lots of change. To have emerged from the first month of the campaign relatively unscathed and with a solid win before we broke up allows us some time to take a breather and work out where we’re at.

Frankly, I think Sunderland have had one of the toughest starts to the season of any club in the division - Ipswich and Preston have both begun very well, and then games against Coventry and Southampton looked mean on paper. There’s only really the Rotherham home game where you might have looked at it and thought “we really should win that”.

So, it’s important to not get too carried away wherever you lie with your feelings.

Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images

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Kyle Garrett says…

I think it came at a good time for us to take a proper look at how the start of the season has gone, but obviously with a 5-0 win you want a game the next day, let alone two weeks later.

I’m confident that we can pick up where we left off, however, just because the players will have gained a huge amount of confidence from that win last weekend.

Hopefully the players who went away with their national teams come back unscathed and we can have a full squad soon!

Photo by Angel Martinez - The FA/The FA via Getty Images

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Malc Dugdale says…

I’m very happy that the we got the result we did just before the break.

I do think although that we found the extra twenty percent of execution in the final third that we needed, we could’ve done with another game soon after to lock that all in.

On the plus side, we’ve had a raft of new players come in, and the time being made available to Tony Mowbray to integrate them into the squad will hopefully see us come out of the international break even stronger than we went into it.

We’ve been playing pretty well all season but we haven’t always got what we deserved, so hopefully we can complement the squad, fill some holes and really kick on, starting with QPR this weekend.

We may not start or even play all our new options this weekend but the break will have helped them settle, so let’s hope the pause doesn’t impact the momentum we’ve just created.

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