TONY MOWBRAY compared Coventry’s match-winner Viktor Gyokeres to Manchester City goal machine Erling Haaland after the Swedish striker produced a masterful performance to dent the Black Cats’ play-off hopes.

Gyokeres scored one and set up another in Coventry’s win against Sunderland and is currently second in the race for the Championship golden boot on 15 league goals.

And after watching Danny Batth and Dan Ballard get bullied by the Sweden international, Mowbray believes Gyokeres is the Championship’s version of elite striker Haaland.

Mowbray said: “You can only judge him (Gyokeres) on the league he’s playing in and the players he’s playing against.

“He looks a yard more powerful and a yard quicker than everyone else, he’s a really confident boy.

“I don’t want to say he should test himself in the Premier League but who is like him in the Premier League at the moment?

“Who is too fast, too strong and too big, you would suggest Haaland is like that and Gyokeres in this league looks a yard faster and stronger than the players he plays against in the Championship.

“The way he buys himself space to shoot is pretty impressive and Coventry did well to hold onto him, he looks a really talented boy.”

The defeat saw Sunderland lose back-to-back league matches for just the second time this season.

And Mowbray believes if Gyokeres was a Sunderland player then the outcome of the game would have turned in the Black Cats' favour.

Mowbray added: “We weren’t positive enough around the opposition box, we came up against a team who play transition football, they’ve got one of the best strikers in the league, you can feel his threat on the transition.

“If we had Gyokeres in our team, we would have won comfortably or put Ross Stewart in the team and I think we win the football match.

“And that’s not knocking Joe (Gelhardt), who’s a boy, we’ll go on our journey and they’ll go on theirs.”

The Sunderland boss was also left frustrated with the way the game was refereed as official Dean Whitestone allowed several rough challenges to go unpunished.

Mowbray said: “It looked like a game from the eighties."