Sunderland face Leicester City on the back of four consecutive defeats, which Mike Dodds acknowledges is not good enough and spoke of the ways he might try and turn things around.
LEICESTER IN BAD FORM
“We watch loads of opposition games and they’re really in terms of the way they want to play, I don’t see them changing for us and I don’t see them changing for anyone in the league if we’re being completely honest. The coach is very thorough and very forthright in the way he wants to play and they’re top of the league for a reason. Is there ever a good time to play a Leicester team that have got the quality they’ve got in depth, coming off the bench? I don’t know, I expect they’re going to make some changes having watched their last three or four games. I would think they’re going to make some changes, where that will be obviously we’ll find out tomorrow evening but my prediction would be that they would probably make some changes and try and freshen one or two things up.”
PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF LOSING FOUR IN A ROW
“From my perspective and when I think you start going down that route, you start to create doubt within the players in terms of the game plan and executing the game plan. From my perspective, not really no. One thing I will say is we’re fully aware in terms of we haven’t won for four games and you know I’m completely clear on that but in terms of the training ground feeling, in terms of the intensity and focus you wouldn’t feel that on the players which I want to make clear that’s a massive positive. That’s not them being flippant or not underestimating the situation, it’s definitely not that, but we’ve had a really good training session. I said to one of the staff, “You wouldn’t know they’ve lost four on the bounce, you know they’re vibrant, they’re at it, they’re asking all the right questions”. So I understand what it looks like, in terms of when you look at the hard facts, the black and white in terms of you know that win or loss but when you’re in here every single day I don’t feel, if I’m being honest, I don’t feel that level of whether you want to call it pressure or that burden. In my mentality, like I said, when the club asked me to take the role I want to try and win every single game and sometimes that’ll work and sometimes that won’t work but that’s the kind of arena I’m sitting in.”
CHANGES TO THE TEAM
"In this game and the next game we'll have to utilise the squad. It's a fine balance between freshening certain areas of the pitch up and trying to have a level of consistency because we want to try and get into a flow and rhythm of how we want to work. So it's just trying to find that balance between freshening things up so that we can be right at it in terms of how we want to set up, but also making sure that we're not clunky and disjointed in what we're trying to do. The next couple of games there'll be changes, we'll see how tomorrow night goes and then on to Saturday where I'm sure there'll be one or tweaks again. We've got Dan Ballard back which is a huge boost but in terms of injuries it's as we were and it's probably a few weeks away from that changing.”
