Jarrod Bowen was fuming after a toothless second-half performance led to an embarrassing 3-0 defeat to Sunderland. 

The West Ham captain spoke before the season about how prepared he and the team were going into the Premier League opener at the Stadium of Light, but clearly, they weren’t prepared anywhere near enough. 

“I’m obviously fuming,” Bowen began. “It’s the start of the season, they’re obviously on a high and in the Premier League, if you don’t take your opportunities, it’s only a matter of time [before your opponents do]. If you don’t defend well enough [they score], and I thought the goals were quite easy, and we’re all disappointed on the manner that we conceded the goals. You’re going to lose games at this level if that happens. So obviously, I’m disappointed and fuming with the start that we’ve had today.”

“I think in the first half, we had our opportunities, and we felt we had another gear to go up into the second half, but ultimately we didn’t do that, then we conceded the goals, and we ended up losing three in the second half.

“We probably had the better of the opportunities in the first half. We probably expected a reaction for them to come out a little bit quicker and a little bit faster. We had a couple of bits of play where we turned the ball over and it was just that little bit slower, more lethargic than probably what the first half was. I think they fed on that. Whether it would be them turning the ball over and them running behind and the crowd getting up, then they put balls in the box and scored their goals from it.”

It is clear that the opposing managers had very different team talks at the break. The Black Cats came out with new motivation and completely took control of the game, while the Hammers struggled massively. And Bowen himself couldn’t understand why. 

Bowen said, “I just don’t think we started the second half with the same intensity as the first half. That’s annoying on our behalf, because that’s the mindset thing from us as a group of players, to keep going, to make sure we win this game, because we knew we didn’t have time coming in. If we’d done what we’d done in the first half in the second, we’d win the game, but we didn’t do that.”