IT will come as no surprise to many that the Football League’s representation in this year’s Carabao Cup is down to just the one side in the last eight.
It may be a bigger surprise that the representative in the quarter-finals is League One side, Sunderland.
Admittedly, Sunderland are not your average League One side, with a stadium capacity of around 49,000 and not forgetting the fact they were a Premier League club as recently as 2017. They also took around 3,000 fans to Loftus Road for their penalty shoot-out Carabao Cup success over Queens Park Rangers.
Their hardcore fans remain as loyal as any in the country even though they have endured many false dawns, with two of their three seasons in League One ending in play-off heartache.
If you like your odds long, they are 100/1 to win this season’s Carabao Cup, not helped by being drawn away at Arsenal (4/1) in the last eight. It’s the tie manager Lee Johnson jokingly wanted, replying when asked who he’d like to face: “I’d love to have Arsenal away or Tottenham away. And then we’ll wait for the really big guns when it’s two legs.”
The fact that Mikel Arteta will be targeting the competition as the Gunners’ best bet for silverware this season will make Johnson and his team’s task at the Emirates even harder, but it is an achievement in itself for a League One side to reach this stage.
Unibet UK offers odds for Chelsea (9/4) and Liverpool (10/3) and top the bookies lists for Carabao Cup success, but Sunderland’s priority this season is promotion to the Championship.
Their problem throughout their spell in League One, and one which is again prevalent this campaign, is a lack of consistency. They win lots of games but typically come unstuck when you least expect it: they have been on the receiving end of thrashings this season from Portsmouth and Rotherham, and were beaten by Charlton who are struggling at the wrong end of the table.
Johnson is well aware that they need to adapt their tactics against certain League One opposition, the teams that are more than happy to go head-to-head with a side that are still seen as the team that all others want to beat.
“We have to learn the lesson, but we have already had a couple of those lessons (at Portsmouth and Rotherham),” said Johnson recently, when talking about their struggles against certain teams. “We’ve continued with the same pattern so whether now it’s a change of personnel, a change of tactics, additions in January; there’s clearly something we have to snuff out to be more solid at times when we are under the cosh.”
Despite their inability to put a run together to push them clear at the top of the League One, the bookies still rate them highly, and they remain favourites for promotion (11/4 to win the league). Rotherham, who recently beat them 5-1, are second favourites at around 3/1, with Wigan and Wycombe both trading at 5/1 to take top spot come next May.
Last season Sunderland were taken over by Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, son of the now deceased former Marseille owner, Robert Louis-Dreyfus, who was CEO of Adidas. The bookmakers clearly see the club as one with financial muscle, but it’s muscle that has yet to flexed.
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