Sunderland 0 Manchester City 3: THEY SAY you should never go back but there are exceptions to every rule and Shaun Wright-Phillips made the happiest of returns to Manchester City colours yesterday.
After a deceptively slow-burning beginning, the winger, who rejoined City from Chelsea for €11.17 million on Thursday, scored two second-half goals and left the Sunderland defence bamboozled by his licence to roam in a withdrawn attacking role.
Well before the end the frustrations accumulated during three largely trying seasons at Stamford Bridge seemed to have been exorcised, albeit at the expense of Roy Keane's serenity.
Sunderland's thunder-faced manager saw his team fold unforgivably after falling behind to Stephen Ireland's opener just before half-time and the former Manchester United captain clearly did not enjoy being serenaded with cheeky chants of "Keano out" from Manchester City's travelling support.
Only last week Keane had hailed the fighting qualities supposedly engendered by his newly "loud and spiky" dressing-room but, stripped of their off-field bling, the ineffective Djibril Cisse, making his home debut, and El Hadji Diouf offered an alarmingly bland attacking mix.
Joe Hart, City's goalkeeper, was not required to make a single testing save.
Garry Cook, City's ambitious new executive chairman, may recently have dubbed Mark Hughes old-fashioned but this was a thoroughly modern display from his side.
Unfazed by Sunderland's initially breathless high tempo, City refused to be sucked into a similar helter-skelter game and, having weathered an initial storm, eventually offered Keane's men a lesson in intelligent passing and movement within a flexible 4-3-2-1 system.
"Shaun will rightly get the headlines but there were several excellent personal performances," enthused Hughes, whose side were particularly strong in central midfield, where Vincent Kompany and Dietmar Hamann shone.
How Keane must have rued the hamstring injury that prevented Anton Ferdinand making his debut after the central defender's move from West Ham last week.
"I'm sure Anton thinks he's got a chance of getting a game here," reflected Sunderland's manager drily.
"I'll be glad to see the back of one or two players going on international duty. City did everything better than us and we could have played all night and not scored. None of my team performed well."
On a day when Hughes completed the signings of Pablo Zabaleta, an Argentinian right-back from Espanyol, and Berti, a Brazilian centre-half on a one-year loan from Nuremberg, City's only concern was the shoulder injury that forced Micah Richards off at the interval and out of the England Under-21 squad.
They broke the deadlock when Hamann and Michael Johnson pierced Sunderland's defence with an incisive pass and a cross.
Although that advance appeared initially to be thwarted by Danny Collins his attempted block merely succeeded in teeing the ball up for Ireland, given an attacking brief here, to stroke a shot low beyond Craig Gordon.
The second half had barely begun when Keane's side were two down, Sunderland paying a heavy price for failing properly to clear Hamann's free-kick, eventually leaving Wright-Phillips free to sidefoot Jo's delicately deflected cross home.
Recently returned from representing Brazil in the Olympics, the €22.35 million Jo grew incrementally into his lone striker's role and Sunderland certainly struggled to fathom his often highly unorthodox game.
It is surely only a matter of time before he scores his first Premier League goal but this was Wright-Phillips's day and when Michael Ball launched a long through-ball forward it found him just onside and far more alert to the potential of such a route-one delivery than Sunderland's defence.
He burst between Collins and Phil Bardsley, then gleefully flicked the ball beyond the advancing Gordon and on into the bottom corner.
"Once again Shaun has proved what an exceptionally talented footballer he is," beamed Hughes. "He brings a new element to our game."
• Guardian Service
