'it would have been a wrong thing to do'-Tom Mowbray defends Amad Diallo's bench role against Burnley

Amad started the game at Turf Moor on the bench for the first 63 minutes, but his deflected shot that rebounded off the crossbar within six minutes of his replacement for Joe Gelhardt nearly had an instant effect.

Idealistically, Mowbray would have preferred to start the Manchester United loanee, but given that Amad had only just arrived in England from Ivory Coast duty late on Thursday, he did not believe he could take a chance on him against the league's top team.


“Amad arrived at the hotel at 7pm on Thursday night," Tom Mowbray said. 

"He came straight from Manchester when his flight got in. He hasn’t trained with anybody all week, so we had no idea what his physical condition is."

“We would obviously want to start with Amad, but we couldn’t. It would have been the wrong thing to do.”

Edouard Michut and Abdoullah Ba were also benched by Tom Mowbray despite having featured for the France Under-20s during the international break in Spain.

The only Sunderland international to play last night was Trai Hume, and the main reason he was chosen for the starting lineup was that he has not played for Northern Ireland.

"Trai is the only player who was away with internationals who played, and that was because he hadn’t had any minutes for Northern Ireland. He came back and was pretty fresh," he added.

“The other two lads who played two games in southern Spain (Michut and Ba), in the Marbella area, they played a lot of football, two-and-a-bit games."

“They’ve both been busy, so they sat on the bench, even though they came back on Thursday. The team picked itself really because none of those lads could play, they’d been away from the club all week.”

Amad Diallo will be looking to fight for a starting berth next season after concluding his loan stint with the championship side. He has had a good loan stint under Tom Mowbray scoring 9 times and assisting thrice.

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