Martin O’Neill today urged his Sunderland players to stay strong in the face of criticism from fans angry at their slow start to the season.
Sunderland were booed off after Tuesday’s Capital One Cup home defeat by Middlesbrough and have made a slow start to their League campaign, winning only once and drawing six of their eight games.
O’Neill’s former club Aston Villa are the visitors to the Stadium of Light tomorrow and O’Neill said: “We have drawn a lot of matches and it’s real doom and gloom . . . sorry, I’m not going with that.
“It’s not a matter of me just being stubborn for the sake of it, it’s there. It’s a season myself and the team should be judged on, not a group of games.
“You can take a statistic from whatever group of games and put whatever spin you want on it. We have played not so well at certain times and thrown away a couple of matches, particularly at the back end of last season.
“Spirit alone is not enough to make a football club great. It’s not. But the spirit does help and that spirit at this minute, when everyone is cat-calling at the moment, that spirit needs to be very, very strong.”
Former Queens Park Rangers chairman Gianni Paladini has made a formal £30million offer for Birmingham City on behalf of an Italy-based consortium.
The bid is made up of an initial payment of around £17million with the rest in instalments.
Birmingham’s current owner Carson Yeung is facing money laundering charges in Hong Kong and is due to make a court appearance later this month.
