Regis Le Bris hailed teenager Chris Rigg after seeing him fire Sunderland to derby victory over Middlesbrough.
The 17-year-old’s audacious back-heeled finish sealed a 1-0 win for Le Bris’ young team at the Stadium of Light and further enhanced his blossoming reputation.
Asked if it was easy to forget how young Rigg is, the Sunderland boss said: “I don’t think that age is a problem.
“You can have a high level of maturity at 17 and you can have a low level of maturity at 30, so it depends of the personality of the player and Chris Rigg is a good symbol of what we want to create and what we want to build as a team, as a club.
“He still wants to improve, he still wants to understand the game and if we can share all these ideas, at the end we can feel the energy as a group, as a unit, as a team even against a strong opponent.”
Rigg’s decisive intervention capped a solid response to the Black Cats’ first defeat of the season at Plymouth last weekend and they might have won even more comfortably had Romaine Mundle’s 79th-minute free-kick not come back off the post.
Le Bris said: “We are human beings. We will forget very quickly our wins but after our defeats, it’s different. But we can learn from both.”
Boro boss Michael Carrick was happy with much of what he saw but mystified by referee Simon Hooper’s decision only to book Trai Hume for an ugly eighth-minute lunge at Emmanuel Latte Lath.
Carrick said: “For me, it’s when is that time, when is that line of time when it’s a game like this and they say, ‘Oh, it’s early and it’s a yellow card, I don’t want to send someone off’, to when is that time when it’s a red card?
“I don’t know when that is, it’s a bit of a grey area for me – if that was the reason why it gets made – I don’t understand the time when it changes.”
Carrick was frustrated to have come away empty-handed after what he felt was a creditable display.
He said: “We’re bitterly disappointed. To come here and lose whatever way we lose is really disappointing. We didn’t come to do that and we understand what the game is, so we can’t hide that in any way.”
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