After playing in his 299th game in all competitions for Sunderland, Luke O'Nien spoke about what went wrong against Hull and discussed how fatigue is being managed in the squad.
BEING RUN INTO THE GROUND...
“I think it's fair to say in my debut season, I remember getting to this kind of stage of the season and, yeah, maybe feeling a little bit heavy-legged. But that's up to us experienced boys to lead their offer of advice and guide and support them. But equally, it's just a 90-minute game of football. It's something that we enjoy."
WINS MAKE LIFE EASIER
“And if you win, it's going to come a lot easier. So our job is now to keep winning, create momentum where people, you know, you create energy. And that's going to be my job now going into tomorrow is to create that energy."
LOW BLOCK
"The hardest bit, it's not down to fatigue or anything like that. It's just teams sitting on a low block and 11 men behind the ball. It's hard to break down. You just have to keep finding ways. And we've just got to find more creative ways to break that down, and then when we do take the lead, teams are going to come out of their block, and we've got to exploit that space. So we know what we need to do. It's easier said than done. We just have to now review it, watch it back and go again on Friday.”
AUTOMATIC PROMOTION HOPES
“It's game-by-game. What we do, the systems we play, every game we play, we've got to revolve and maybe we didn't do that today, but tomorrow will be a big day for us where the team will get better if we watch it. I've said it from the start of the season, from the very first game. We’ve won games and been at the top to where we are at the minute right now."
12 GAMES LEFT NOW
“There's a hell of a lot of work to do. When you win a game, if you go into first or second, it's irrelevant. It's where you are on the 46th game that's the most important. So there's a lot of minutes to be played, a lot of points to get picked up and our focus isn't just to win a game, look at the table and get all emotional. It's win, lose, reflect, make sure the team moves forward and go towards the next game.”
