Reflecting on Sunderland's solid win over Norwich, Tony Mowbray spoke of the belief in the dressing room and the confidence to play on the front foot against tough oppositions.
BELIEF
“Football is about confidence and belief and togetherness. The key of course is when you lose a few games to keep the belief and confidence, and keep going. I think we would have been doing that anyway. I think there's a lot of real hard work gone into this season and we’ve got 52 points now, we had 49 before the weekend. I don't know where the end game is going to be but what you don’t want to do is get a group of inexperienced players worried, looking over their shoulders, looking at the table like ‘god if we lose the next two or three and they’re pretty tough games we could be looking at getting dragged in’. I think the three points at the weekend gives you 52 points, I think we can go into the next ten games and just attack them really and be positive."
NO RELEGATION BATTLE
"Even if we don’t win any, I haven't studied the stats but 52 points is a lot of points if you're going to be relegated or sucked into a relegation battle. So my point being I think there's a lot of really good work, a lot of positive stuff gone on with the team. They've worked extremely hard, they are pretty inexperienced in this league but let's hope we can finish strong, let's hope the intention is to be positive against every team, not to fear their approach but to go and play on the front foot and be positive and see how many wins we can get of the next ten.”
CREATED CHANCES
“What I was trying to say there was that before the Norwich game we had 49 points, with total respect to the three teams sitting in the bottom three at the moment, they’re really struggling to win football matches and they're gonna have to probably win five or six of their last ten to get to 49 points. I’m not sure they’re gonna do that so there wasn't a lot of pressure before going into the Norwich game. We told them to be positive, to play on the front foot, to enjoy the challenge and that's what we did. I thought in the first half particularly we created two or three really good chances and we could have scored more goals. It wasn't a team full of anxiety and tension and nervousness sitting back; it was a team on the front foot and that's the way we played at the weekend and hopefully that’s how we will play tomorrow and for the rest of the season."
GOOD CHALLENGES
"I think again, I would say that I’m not sure how long since the start of this season that we’ve played Norwich, I think all the games that we play should be a fantastic challenge for our club over the last four years or whatever it is that they were in League One, to play Sheffield United who were in the Premier League not so long ago and to play Norwich. All the teams, the Middlesbrough’s, the Blackburn’s, two teams there I mentioned that we have beaten at home recently over the last two months so we shouldn't fear playing the teams in the top six. We should see it as a great challenge and somewhere where we want to try and strive to be, and let’s see how close we are to these teams.”
