Sunderland showed 'the best and the worst' of themselves in their see-saw victory against Shrewsbury

Alex Neil admits Sunderland showed 'the best and the worst of us in one match' in their dramatic victory against Shrewsbury Town. The Black Cats made an outstanding start, with goals from Elliot Embleton and Nathan Broadhead giving them a 2-0 lead inside the opening quarter-of-an-hour.

But Sunderland ceded the initiative to Shrewsbury as half-time approached and they came back into the game, scoring twice after the break to level things up before the hour mark. And it needed another injury-time goal from Broadhead - who had scored a 95th minute winner in the previous home game - to earn the points.

"What you've seen today is the best and the worst of us in one match," said Neil. "The first 40 minutes was as good and as clean as we have moved the ball all season, we moved it at real tempo and created a lot of problems for them, they couldn't really get near it and they didn't have an answer for what we were trying to do.

"But then a sloppiness crept in about five minutes before half-time, too many people taking too many touches, complicating the game, trying to show everybody how good they are and what happened was they [Shrewsbury] started to get a bit of a sniff of the match and thought that they could get something out of it. They scored a goal that was disallowed, and I warned the players at half-time that they were going to have to win their battles, win the second balls, you are going to have to stop their momentum and get the next goal to kill the game.

"If we get the next goal it's done; if they get the next goal it's game on. But we got beat up for 20 minutes, that's the be-all and end-all. It wasn't a structural problem, you could see at the end that we were totally dominant - the game hadn't changed - what