Sunderland have the nucleus of a 'really good, exciting, young team', according to Tony Mowbray - and they are just a couple of ingredients short of finding a winning recipe. The Black Cats earned a point against Championship high-fliers Luton Town at the Stadium of Light yesterday to go 11th in the table and cut the gap between themselves and the play-off places to seven points.
Given that Sunderland are in their first year back in the second tier after a four-year stay in League One, and they have had to manage for two-thirds of the season without star striker Ross Stewart and the final third of the campaign without experienced skipper Corry Evans, their progress has been remarkable. Mowbray knows his squad is lacking in key areas, not least because he has no like-for-like replacement for Stewart, but rather than dwell on its shortcomings, he prefers to focus on its strengths and look ahead to the potential that could be unlocked with the right recruitment this summer and the return of players from injury.
"The team we have is what we are at the moment," said Mowbray. "We are missing certain ingredients that would make us a really good team, but we have to get on with it.
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"I don't want to keep moaning about who's not available, we've got the team we've got so let's keep going and let's keep trying to find a way and be competitive. I'd love to win 3-0 or 4-0 every week but at this moment we don't have the ingredients to be able to do that to teams.
"I think they are doing great - amazing. We just have to keep going and keep competing in the league, we're not where we are in the division by accident, it's by hard work, a way of playing, the identity of the team.
"I try and tell them that we're not far away. We need to get some injured players back, we have to get the recruitment right in the summer, but we have the nucleus of a really good, exciting, young team."
Sunderland have been in and around the play-off race for much of the season and only in the last month, in which they have won one of their last seven games, have they fallen away somewhat. But at the start of the season qualifying for the play-offs was not seen as a realistic aim, even though hopes were raised by the form the team showed in the first five months of the campaign.
With eight games remaining, Sunderland are not yet completely out of the running although they are now firmly regarded as outsiders. And as they head into the international break, Mowbray says they just need to concentrate on their next game which will be their toughest test of the season as they head to runaway leaders Burnley, who are unbeaten at Turf Moor, a week on Friday.
Mowbray said: "To be honest, we should be looking forward to playing Burnley after this. I know we've got two players [Dan Ballard and Trai Hume] away with Northern Ireland, Amad's away with the Ivory Coast, we've got two [Abdoullah Ba and Edouard Michut] away with France U20s, Patto [Anthony Patterson] is going away with England U21, Jewison Bennette with Costa Rica, so we'll have seven or eight players away who are generally in our team, so we won't be able to spend the next two weeks preparing for Burnley on the grass.
"We'll probably have one day to work with them - two days for some and one for others - but we'll just go and be positive and play our game like we did at Fulham in the FA Cup and like we did at Norwich last week. We have to be aggressive, be on the front foot, test them out.
"If they beat us, they beat us."
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