Sunderland manager Chris Coleman still believes that his side can escape the drop down to League One.
Sunderland manager Chris Coleman remains defiant in the face of danger, with the Sunderland Echo reporting that he still believes the club can avoid relegation to League One.
The Black Cats suffered their third league defeat in four at the weekend when they lost 2-0 to Ipswich Town, which led many fans to proclaim that they were destined for the drop.
But Coleman is not an advocate of that viewpoint, and instead he is choosing to look on the bright side of things.
“Yeah, I won’t lie to you,” Coleman said. “As a manager, the number of good night’s sleep you have during a season are not many.
“The frustrating there here is if we were an absolute waste of time and I looked and thought we had no chance of getting out of this, I’d probably go and say to Martin, ‘Come on, let’s have a chat. I can’t, we haven’t got it, there’s not enough here.’
“But there is a chance for us to get out of it and that’s when you get sleepless nights, on the back of games like today.”
Sunderland’s decline has been quite remarkable when you consider that just under a decade ago they were a team that was being talked about as potential contenders for the top six in the Premier League. Since then they have been through a variety of changes both in terms of their squad and management, which has left them on the verge of complete collapse.
If they do indeed succumb to the drop, they will be the first team to go from the Premier League to the third tier in consecutive seasons since Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2013.
Coleman has experience when it comes to getting teams out of tricky situations, but the majority of Sunderland fans in the present day will likely believe that they are beyond help at this stage.
Things do not get any easier from here, either, with a trip to Bristol City coming up this Saturday.
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