The team didn't look especially lazy or unmotivated to me, they just looked clueless. In fact MIlner (who's come in for a lot of criticism) appeared to be trying his heart out. He just made a ton of errors. If anything, he seemed to be trying too hard - why try the fancy stuff when there's an easy pass on? Almost looked like he was trying to do too much on his own.
We weren't getting nearly as many overlapping runs from the fullbacks as usual, so we just seemed to wander about in the middle, not looking dangerous at all, until someone made a bad pass, or there was a miscommunication and we lost the ball. And when Sunderland had the ball, we seemed to retreat to the edge of our box and put zero pressure on their midfield.
There's obviously a lot of off the ball stuff you can't see on the TV 6,000 miles away, but it did appear that Pellegrini made a mistake by only having 4 midfield players, especially as Milner seemed to be staying out wide and Nasri seemed to disappear for long periods. Although I was looking forward to a return to 4-4-2 and was happy to see the Aguero/Negredo partnership given another chance, that was before I knew Silva would be missing. With him and Yaya both out, and Nasri not having nearly as much influence recently as he did earlier in the season, it should have been clear that we might be a bit light in the middle. However, I've thought the same thing several times before and we've gone out and tonked some unsuspecting team by 5 or 6 goals, so I'm happy to acknowledge it wasn't an unreasonable thing to do. But from about the 5th minute on, it was clear that it wasn't going to work that way in this match, and Pellegrini should have made some changes a lot sooner to sort it out.
Parts of this season have been brilliant, and I'm certainly not in the "Pellegrini Out!" camp, but he's yet to convince me he really knows what he's doing.