If you’d asked AI to capture the essence of the 1990’s, they couldn’t have done a much better job than merely presenting you with the events of our most recent matchday.

Sunderland topping The Championship after swatting aside their latest opponent, decked out in stunning Hummel kits, while the away end belted out ‘cheer up Peter Reid’, on the same day as Oasis released tickets for their forthcoming tour, felt eerily familiar.

As with most AI generated content, there would be imperfections, such as the lads not having Hummel as a kit manufacturer during Reid’s time at the club, but what’s a bit of poetic licence among friends?

Our start to the season has been beyond our wildest dreams, four victories, three clean sheets, ten goals, just one conceded and that was an own goal, so we’ve still scored more goals against ourselves than the entire league has put past Anthony Patterson all season.

The temptation is to urge caution and insist that we do not get carried away, which of course is a logical argument.

After all, we boast one of the youngest squads in the league with a manager who doesn’t have a huge body of work to form a judgement on and at some stage burnout, loss of form and teams figuring us out will potentially play a part.

Where’s the fun in that though? As a supporter if you can’t get carried away with recent results there’s not much point in being a football fan, especially after the events of last season.

It goes without saying that our start to the season has been impressive in every way possible, and I believe we have already demonstrated some strong foundations for success and have gone a long way to challenging perceptions and reservations a sizable section of the fanbase (yours truly included) had going into the season.

When analysing our start, it makes sense to start with its architect, Regis Le Bris.

When the Frenchman was initially appointed, there was an equal split between reasons to be positive and sceptical.

In his first and only job in senior management, he had guided Lorient to their highest league position in the club’s history before suffering relegation in his second year.

Fans of the French outfit cited Le Bris as a deep thinker and tactically astute on one hand but extremely stubborn and inflexible on the other.

Of course, we are yet to see how the Frenchman will react to adversity, but he has already shown a proactive mindset and problem-solving capability.

As we kicked off the season away at Cardiff City, we had made just four additions to the squad that finished last season in 16th place, consisting of a first team quality player in Alan Browne, two back up goalkeepers and an unfit Ian Poveda.

Despite this, Le Bris used our pre-season trip to Spain to embed his style of play on the training field and make some firm, cutthroat decisions about who was capable of implementing it and who wasn’t.

From Blackpool onwards there was no room for experimentation, we selected unchanged sides against the Tangerines, Marseille and Cardiff.

Against Marseille you could see the foundations of our emerging style of play as we pressed high, went into a 4-4-2 out of possession and although they cut through us on occasion, it was clear to see what we were trying to achieve.

So far, Cardiff is possibly the biggest outlier we’ve had in terms of performance levels and style, but even in that game the general pattern was established. Out of possession, we looked comfortable, had good security behind the ball and despite lacking a clinical edge on the counter attack at times, we turned the ball over well and created opportunities.

This trend has continued, with Le Bris finding a great balance between fluid attacking football, getting bodies forward at pace with an excellent defence structure and a coordinated press.

This was exemplified against Burnley, where we not only won the ball back in dangerous areas but our management of transitions showed considerable improvement, from a Sunderland corner the visitors threatened to spring a quick counter attack, but we got bodies back in numbers and snuffed out the attack comfortably.

The defensive shape is probably the most pleasantly surprising element of our good start, even during the best days under Tony Mowbray we looked like we always looked vulnerable to conceding a daft goal and under Mick Beale and Michael Dodds any modicum of defensive solidity was at the complete detriment to attacking flair.

Ahead of the season, I was concerned that Le Bris’ Lorient side had conceded the most goals in the league but so far in his Sunderland tenure, I have mercifully been proved massively wrong.

The second point of praise, I must give Le Bris is the way he has got a tune out of Eliezer Mayenda. Going into the first game it was a glaring concern that we didn’t have an out and out front man but so far the Spaniard has four goal contributions from his first four games and looked every inch a solid Championship player.

I still think we are an experienced centre forward light up front despite the arrivals of Wilson Isidor and Ahmed Abdullahi, but I have faith in Le Bris to get a tune out of the players we have through rotation and clear tactical instruction.

On the subject of our recruitment, lingering striker concerns aside, I feel the window has been a very positive one.

Since Corry Evans suffered his long term injury in January 2023,we have been found wanting in the centre of the park from a defensive point of view, so it was good to see the club remedy this with the loan signing of Salis Abdul Samed who arrives with both experience and excellent pedigree.

The addition of Browne has added a much needed calmness to our play and although Milan Aleksić is a more offensively-minded player, he will no doubt have a part to play throughout the season.

Suddenly, this is a position where we’ve had sufficient depth to loan out a player who appeared in 42 league matches last season in Pierre Ekwah.

It was also refreshing to see the club move quickly to bring in Chris Mepham to replace the injured Aji Alese on deadline day.

So far we are yet to feel the void left by Jack Clarke but I was disappointed that we didn’t invest the money we got for him on a proven centre forward or left winger.

It is great that Isidor can play as both a wing forward and as a striker but we have created the paradox where if he plays up front we are potentially relying too heavily on Romain Mundle to replicate his excellent form over our remaining 42 games, and if he plays off the left wing, we are potentially going to be overly reliant on Mayenda. This is of course presuming that Ahmed Abdullahi will slowly be bedded into the team, because again I feel it would be unfair on him to be expected to contribute massively off the back of very limited exposure to senior football.

I don’t want to go out on something negative, so I will end by heaping yet more praise on Le Bris.

Since arriving on Wearside he has shown a calm determination to simply get on with his job and get the best out of the players at his disposal, there’s no Lee Johnson management speak or Michael Beale using every press conference as a score settling exercise.

Instead he has quietly driven up standards, by declaring himself ‘happy with the first 25 minutes’ against Burnley and when it was put to him that he’d overseen our first impeccable three games to a campaign since 1925, he simply replied, “it is good.”

Next up we travel to Plymouth Argyle who have yet to win under the already under-fire Wayne Rooney and have scored just twice in their first four games of the season, while conceding seven…what could possibly go wrong there?