Sunderland’s season got off to the worst possible start with Saturday’s 4-2 defeat at Leicester City, but events at the King Power Stadium were hardly a radical departure from the norm. Chief Sports Writer Scott Wilson met Seb Larsson to discuss the lessons of the past, and hopes for a brighter future

THIS is Seb Larsson’s fifth season as a Sunderland player and, by his own admission, the previous four have contained far too many days like Saturday.

The trudge from the pitch with the jeers of the Sunderland supporters still ringing in your ears. The sense of shell-shock in the dressing room, with anger and recrimination blending with disbelief at what has just occurred. The long, silent coach ride home, where a player becomes enveloped with his own private thoughts and regrets.

For Saturday’s 4-2 defeat at Leicester City read last season’s 8-0 humiliation at Southampton. Or the previous season’s 5-1 thrashing at Tottenham. Or the year before that’s 6-1 capitulation at Aston Villa.

Defeat, despair, disillusionment. All sentiments that have become part and parcel of being a player who spends any significant amount of time with Sunderland.

“You never get used to those feelings,” admitted Larsson yesterday afternoon, as he sat in a makeshift classroom at the Academy of Light, preparing to attend a video debrief of Saturday’s King Power Stadium collapse. “You might think that as players, we’ve seen it all before, but that honestly doesn’t make it any easier to bear.

“It’s still as bad, and the day it stops feeling that bad is the day you need to start thinking about doing something else. It’s not nice, but the reality is that you have to go through it. You can’t hide away, you have to confront it head on and move on.”

Yet as Larsson knows only too well, that is a mantra that has been trotted out time and time before. Every season, Sunderland’s players produce the same platitudes about improving things; every season they revert to type and serve up displays such as last weekend’s.

The supporters are tired of hearing such comments, and the players – Larsson included – are tired of producing them. Yet if they were to stop believing in their validity, that would really be the time to start pressing the panic button.

As one of the most intelligent and personable members of the Sunderland squad, Larsson knows only too well that it ultimately serves no one’s purpose to promise things that cannot be delivered.

Unrealistic expectations can be more damaging than having no expectations at all, but as he looks ahead to the 37 Premier League games that remain, the 30-year-old is convinced that an improvement on what has gone before during his time on Wearside is an attainable target.

Other clubs might have started much more strongly than Sunderland, and other clubs might be spending much more money than the Black Cats. Ultimately, though, they are hurdles that can be overcome.

“You have to be realistic,” said Larsson. “If I’m honest, I don’t think it’s that realistic to say we’re going to be playing European football next year. But to have a better season than we had in the last couple of years? That should be a realistic aspiration.

“I honestly think we can do that. Over the last couple of seasons, the spells where we have been poor and not picking up points have been way too long. You’re always going to have them in a season, but they shouldn’t be anything like as long as they have been and that’s one of the main things we have to address.

“It hasn’t been a spell of two or three games, which is something that most teams go through. With us, it’s tended to be a ten-game period and that cripples you. When that happens, and you can’t get out of it, you’re going to struggle.

“To improve on that is realistic, although even that is not going to be easy. People have been spending big money and bringing in a lot of good players, and of course that makes things more difficult. The majority of teams in the Premier League are getting better and more competitive. That isn’t going to make things any easier, but it’s definitely realistic to do better than we have in the last few years.”

To do that, Sunderland’s players will have to cut out the kind of ten-minute collapse that proved so costly against Leicester. All too often in recent seasons, the concession of one goal has rapidly escalated into two or three finding the back of the Black Cats’ net.

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It is tempting to conclude the trend is a sign of a deep-rooted mental fragility within the squad that will be difficult to reverse. Larsson, however, denies that, citing instead a tactical naivety and organisational dysfunction that is possible to overcome.

“Of course you wonder why these things keep happening,” he said. “In all honesty, they’ve happened a few times now. There’s far too many occasions where we’ve collapsed in games, and that’s what happened on Saturday again.

“After the first ten minutes, when it was 0-0, we were doing okay. We should have been one, or possibly even two, goals up. Ten minutes later, and we’re 3-0 down from two crosses and a penalty. After that, at least for the first half, we couldn’t get ourselves together. You could see we were all over the place and our brains weren’t working, and that’s something we definitely have to improve.”

Saturday’s home game with Norwich provides an immediate opportunity to right a few wrongs, and for all that last weekend’s humbling was an embarrassment, things would feel rather different if Sunderland were to rediscover the solidity that served them so well in the latter part of last season in order to see off the Canaries.

“We have to be honest and say it was a very, very poor performance, but we also have to acknowledge that it’s one game in and we need to put it right straight away,” said Larsson. “Hopefully, if we can do that, we won’t have too many worries.”