9:20am Thursday 11th March 2010
By Marc Iles
GRETAR Steinsson has warned that Wanderers cannot afford to overreact to Tuesday night’s setback at Sunderland.
The 4-0 thumping at the Stadium of Light tarnished what had been encouraging back-to-back victories over Wolves and West Ham, which had lifted Owen Coyle’s men well clear of the bottom three.
And while the natural tendency may be to look back over their shoulder at the relegation issue after such a result, Iceland international Steinsson is keen to consign it to the past, on the eve of Saturday’s local derby against Wigan.
“Saturday is a massive game, not only for the club and ourselves, but for the fans too,” he said. “We need to pick ourselves up, do our crying, and be ready to go again from there.”
Wanderers had reason to believe they had turned a corner after picking up six points in seven days, and heading to a club that had not won a game in 2010.
But Darren Bent’s hat-trick helped the Black Cats climb above the Whites into 13th position – and while the margin of defeat was a hard pill to swallow, Steinsson reckons the performance will be quickly forgotten.
“You can’t be depressed after this,” he said. “Things happen.
“We just need to pick ourselves up because we got a great result against Wolves, a fantastic result against West Ham.
“We maybe shouldn’t have lost a game like we did against Sunderland but we did give everything, and it wasn’t enough. They have got fantastic players who will take their chances, and they did.”
Sunderland’s first goal, scored by Frazier Campbell after only 41 seconds, has been confirmed as the fastest Premier League goal of this season, but still some way short of Ledley King’s 10-second strike for Spurs against Bradford in 2000.
And Steinsson admitted that conceding so early is something Wanderers can ill-afford to do against Wigan this weekend.
“It’s quite simple, if you start a game like that in the Premier League – especially away from home – against a side that needed just a little boost to get them out of the slump they had been in, then it’s going to be really hard to come back from,” he said.
“We showed character and tried to come back but they got the second one, and then the penalty, so we knew it wasn’t going our way.
“We can do better than that, though, we didn’t show half of the good work we did on Saturday against West Ham so we need to pick ourselves up and prepare for Wigan.”
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