The midfielder headed Stephane Sessegnon's cross straight at Wojciech Szczesny who made a great reaction save to stop the Wearsiders taking a 2-1 lead.

"I'd be disappointed not to stick that in from three yards and I'm sure Lee will be when he sees that back," Bruce told reporters. "It's a great save, let's be fair. We've showed a huge amount of resilience today to get back into it. It was an awful start to come here and be one down after 35 seconds gives them a huge big lift. For 20 minutes we had to stick in there, all credit to them. Seb [Larsson] got us back into the game with a wonder-goal. The big turning point of the game, for me, was the miss just before halftime. If we had of took that it might have been a different story, but there you go."

Bruce is confident his side can turn it around despite being above the relegation on goal difference alone, but concedes the Black Cats must improve quickly and stop making mistakes.

"We've played badly only once in the eight games, that was against Norwich which we were disappointed with," he continued. "We've had a disappointing start and you know what this is. We were two nil down last week after three minutes and got back into it. It's been a frustration for us. We have to admit that it's been a disappointing start but we must make sure we stick at it and we'll improve. I'm not going to blame individuals but it fell for them after 30 seconds," he added. "Van Persie is a wonderful player. He took his goal fantastically well. For me, the one criticism is we give too many free kicks on the edge of the box. When you've got somebody like Van Persie's quality we can't keep asking them to hit it over the bar like they repeatedly did."