Sunderland 1 Portsmouth 2: ANYONE ACCIDENTALLY stumbling into Portsmouth's dressingroom at about 5pm on Saturday would have been greeted by the sight of Tony Adams dancing for joy.
The visiting manager had just presided over a first, albeit fortuitous, victory since succeeding Harry Redknapp and his players wanted to make the occasion special.
"We put the music on, it came from (the defender) Noe Pamarot. He's our DJ," explained Jermain Defoe, whose stoppage-time penalty secured the unlikely win. "Tony was bopping along with us - well, trying to."
It is, of course, a long time since Adams last strutted his stuff in nightclubs but Defoe pointed out that a man who has radically reinvented himself since giving up alcohol 12 years ago is not quite as seriously strait-laced as widely imagined. "Tony doesn't just like classical music, he plays the guitar as well, you know," the striker added.
Rather more importantly, Adams must now prove that he can cut it as a manager rather than merely as the charismatic Redknapp's number two. It does not help that the former England and Arsenal centre-half has been handed a poisoned chalice.
Quite apart from Portsmouth's alarming debts and uncertainty over the ownership of the club, certain players, Defoe included, are rumoured to be heading for reunions with Redknapp at Tottenham.
Moreover, had Adams presided over a fourth game without a win, muttered doubts about his suitability for the frontline would, rightly or wrongly, have become increasingly audible.
Adams's painstakingly rebuilt persona conveys a slight evangelical aura and his well-wishers must hope that the two coaching appointments he makes this week are down-to-earth characters capable of complementing and counter-balancing his more unorthodox, left-field qualities.
"I'm having a fantastic experience but the Premier League is a tough place," Adam said. "But I've got to steady the ship, I've got to ride the waves."
Battered by an initially impressive attacking storm from Sunderland, Portsmouth improved after Nadir Belhadj's stunning 25-yard equaliser and enjoyed a piece of good fortune courtesy of a ridiculous penalty-conceding lunge at Glen Johnson by the hugely disappointing second-half substitute El Hadji Diouf.
The scorer had until then been largely marked out of the game by a combination of his former West Ham team-mate Anton Ferdinand and Nyron Nosworthy.
"Anton was saying, 'You're not going to score, I'm not going to let you', but I told him, 'Trust me, I will'," Defoe said. "I like him a lot but Anton tried to put me off at the penalty, he told me he thought I was going to miss but he was wrong."
It consigned Sunderland, who had assumed an early lead when Djibril Cisse made the most of a 40-yard through-pass from the excellent Andy Reid, to a third successive defeat.
Paradoxically Roy Keane's side played arguably their best, and purest, football of the season but the high-calibre passing and movement from Kieran Richardson and company was frequently let down by poor finishing.
• Guardian Service
