Sunderland's promotion momentum and sense of togetherness has continued into their Championship campaign - and Bailey Wright it can help them 'do something special' this season. The Black Cats lost just one game from mid-February until the end of the season to secure a League One play-off spot and ultimately promotion at Wembley last term.
And they have made an excellent start to life back in the second tier, sitting tenth in the table but just three points outside the play-off places with a little over a third of the season remaining. Sunderland are determined not to get carried away, but there is no hiding the sense of positivity and optimism within the squad.
"I think the momentum from last season and wanting to finish as high up the table as possible has continued for us this season," said Wright. "For sure it is a stronger division but we back ourselves.
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"We are still inexperienced as a squad, I guess you could say, but with inexperience comes a lot of excitement. I think we've got a lot of potential in the squad and in the team to keep on developing and progressing, which is massively important.
"We're past the halfway mark of the season and we are in a good position. By no means are we comfortable or happy with what we have achieved, but we know what we are capable of.
"I think the highest we have sat this season was fourth - albeit not for long! But the division is still very tight and with a couple of wins you can be up there, while a couple of losses can see you slip, so we're not going to get carried away.
"In football you have to separate out internal noise and external noise, but both matter. The internal noise is what we do day-to-day, what we see the opposition is, and what we believe we can do.
"That has carried on from last season to this season. You can feel the togetherness in the group and that counts for a hell of a lot.
"Ability and quality helps, but togetherness and spirit also helped get us through last season and it will be the same this season. As long as we keep on improving in all aspects of our game, I think we can really have a right go this season.
"We've always said that when this place gets going, it's a very tough place to come and we've shown that this season. But there's no job done, we've still got nearly half the season to go and hopefully we can go and do something special."
Sunderland suffered a setback at the weekend when they lost 3-1 at home to Swansea City, with Luke O'Nien's red card inside the opening 20 minutes pivotal to the outcome. But Wright said: "Saturday wasn't ideal, but there are going to be bumps in the road.
"We have to remember where we were 12 months ago compared to where we are now. That said, we don't want to keep looking back on where we have been and what we have done, we want to keep on pushing forward and reach the next target and the next goal.
"There are a lot of things to look forward to. It's going to be a really tough second half of the season but I'm looking forward to it."
Wright was speaking at a Show Racism the Red Card event hosted at Sunderland's Beacon of Light, where children from Dame Dorothy Primary and Easington Primary schools were taking part in an anti-racism workshop. SRtRC was founded in 1996 and more than 990,000 people have so far taken part in its anti-racism workshops and annual schools' competitions, with that total set to reach the one million mark next month.
Wright, along with his Sunderland teammate Aji Alese and Black Cats legends Gary Bennett and Kevin Ball, were at the Beacon of Light workshop and took part in a question and answer session with the youngsters. Wright said: "It was great to be here with Gary and Bally, two club legends, and to listen to them speak and then for us all to take questions from the kids.
"The kids have had a great day learning and you can see they have taken in a lot of information and they had a lot of great questions to ask us. Aji and myself are here at the club now but we are very inexperienced compared to Gary and Bally, but we all have our own stories to share.
"The overall message was that days and seminars like this are important because we are educating the next generation who are going to make this world a better place, and to be part of that is massively important. When you play for a club like Sunderland and we have the Foundation and the Beacon, and they work with Show Racism the Red Card to put on events like this, it is not only the kids getting educated, so are we.
"Looking ahead, I hope things like this can become more and more frequent in a positive way, and that it leads to less racism which we know still exists and we are all trying to tackle it. Just looking at it from a footballing perspective, if you think about how the game was, it has taken steps in the right direction.
"We know that racism is still happening - there are too many stories of it still happening, unfortunately - but as professional footballers, fans of the game, anyone associated with the sport, we have a role to play in improving the game and people like Gary and Bally laid the foundations and are continuing to play a part post their playing careers. Now it's people like Aji and myself who are playing now, and we are in dressing rooms where people are more educated about racism and it doesn't occur in the way that maybe it did several years ago.
"From that perspective, it's definitely going in the right direction but we have to continue learning and developing. If you look at our dressing room and the different nationalities, different colours, different languages we all speak, that's the beauty of our game - it brings people from all over the world for a common goal, which is to represent Sunderland AFC."
Australia international Wright was part of the Socceroos squad that reached the last 16 of the World Cup in Qatar last month, before bowing out against eventual winners Argentina. "From an Australian perspective, obviously I haven't lived there for 16 years, but you only have to look at our national team and the work being down with our PFAs and our governing bodies, to see how we want to improve our country," he said.
"I think our national team at the World Cup was the most diverse national team we've ever had in Australia. I really felt that at this World Cup, with how diverse and multicultural the squad was, it really resembled the real Australia that we are living in.
"Football is a sport that brings people together. Australia is still a really young country with a lot of people of different nationalities and people who have migrated out to Australia to live and enjoy the country, and when you look at where we have all come from it resonates with the nation."
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