David Moyes blames individual errors after Sunderland's 3-1 loss to Stoke

Sunderland manager David Moyes says individual mistakes were to blame for his side's 3-1 defeat to Stoke City in the Premier League on Saturday afternoon.

Marko Arnautovic's two goals in the space of seven first-half minutes was enough for the Potters to kill off any real chance of a Sunderland fightback before Peter Crouch scored just 13 minutes later.

Jermain Defoe did pull one back in the first half, but the Black Cats failed to kick-start a comeback and remain in the bottom three.

"We just made three dreadful individual mistakes for goals," said Moyes.

"We gave the ball away, made mistakes. A couple of one-twos we could have cut out and a goalkeeping mistake for the third one meant that we were 3-0 down and we hadn’t done anything. Not that Stoke did anything either.

"We found ourselves 3-0 down and we were out of the game by then.

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"Mistakes can come from anywhere. They can come at any time. The idea is to make sure you don’t have too many of them. We made three of them in the one game today."

The result leaves Sunderland 19th in the Premier League table, with plenty of the home fans leaving the stadium early in the first half and towards the end of the match.

Moyes says the reaction is unsurprising from the fans, but credited his team's improvement in the second half.

He said: "I might have left early today when we went down 3-0 down.

"But what I will say is that if you stayed for the rest of it was we stuck at it, we got a goal back. We kept at it in the second half and tried to get a second goal to rally but we just couldn’t quite get it."

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