Ahead of the Stoke game on Saturday, Tony Mowbray expects Alex Neil to have his side “wound up” ahead of his first return to Wearside following his exit.
WEEK OFF HELPS
“I think physiologically and physically the bumps and bruises, yes it helps they don’t have to get strapped up and go back out, I think more mentally for us just to take a break from the three days a game and be ready for the weekend and know what's coming and I'm sure the supporters will be ready for the game and we have to find a performance level that makes it difficult for Stoke on the day and we can get the three points.”
FAN REACTION
“I think the atmosphere is always pretty good here, generally teams come and try and slow the game down, lots of stoppages, take too long for goal kicks, roll over and get the physio on and calm the crowd down. I’m not sure of the mentality of Alex coming into the game, having managed football teams against his teams a lot over recent years he was only down the road at Preston North End for a long time when I was at Blackburn Rovers, what I do know his teams are always intense and they fight for every ball, they're very very competitive and I think the crowd will get wrapped up in the match as well because of what goes on in the field. I think it will probably be feisty and our crowd will be very supportive of the team I’m sure and we have to make sure we turn up on the day and represent the colours of our club, I’m sure Alex will have his team wound up as well.”
3 POINTS EXPECTED?
“I think every game is, every game there is points available for us, the previous two games we managed not to get three points and it’s really frustrating for us, you look on paper there's teams below in the division that we should be trying to win and be positive and aggressive and for whatever reason on any given day it doesn’t work out for you the intention is to win every game whether it’s Stoke City this weekend or Norwich City the following week away we have the intent to go and win the football match, every team in the league has something to fight for and I’m not sure with Alex coming back to Sunderland he’ll have his team wound up and again I don’t know whether they’re looking over their shoulder you know they have to win a few matches as they move forward and for us we have to try and make up the ground that we’ve lost the last week with losing two games.”
LEAGUE POSITION
“I haven’t really looked at the table but I think we’re four points outside, three points at the weekend and we could find ourselves two points outside and still with eleven games to go there is still everything to play for so you can’t keep losing games of course so we will try to get back to winning ways on the weekend knowing that we’re still very much in touch if we wanted to start the season now and say right you’ve only got twelve games to go and your four points off the play-offs we’d have probably all taken that so we can get disappointed we haven't picked up any points this week but we’ve still got a great opportunity to show what we’re all about as a team and I think everyone is working really really hard and I said after the game the other day I felt we didn’t just have the tools to get the job done and we could all sit here and be disappointed that Ross Stewart isn’t here, Ellis Simms went back to Everton, it’s history now we have to get on with what we’ve got and I’ve always talked about trying to find a way to score goals without an out and out striker and like when we had no defenders really when all the centre halves seemed to get injured you have to find a way to keep clean sheets and that’s what we’re doing. Keep going, keep working hard, try to impose our style on the opposition. We have to play the way we play with the type of players we’ve got and that’s what we’ll continue to do but trying to find a way of trying to bring a cutting edge to the possession play that we have.”
CHANGING HABITS
“It’s very difficult to change the natural habits of footballers, they're a footballer because from being a very small kid they've done the same thing so they’ve either been a dribbler or a physical player who likes to run without the ball or a great passer. It’s very difficult to change the habits in a short period of time of a team because the players will do what they do. So we have a lot of technical footballers who like the ball to their feet, like to manipulate it and play people in, play one-twos , in my mind we haven't quite got the balance of footballers to benefit from the technical players we’ve got, again if I go back to Ross Stewart, he likes to run in the space behind defences, he wants to be slipped into the gap behind the centre half and run, get his body across and hold them off and smash it into the net and at this moment we haven't got enough people in my mind who run without the ball in behind the opposition, we’ve got loads of players who want to get the ball and dribble and look for somebody they can slip in but we are just trying to find a way of exploit the space behind defences more and once we crack that or repeat, repeat and repeat it on the training ground and it becomes more natural to the players on matchday we’ll start scoring more goals.”
