Ross Stewart has stressed the importance of Saturday's win over promotion rivals Wigan Athletic. The Black Cats made light work of the second placed Latics, to end a dismal run of results.
Sunderland must now put together a string of results to try and claw back lost ground on the automatic promotion places, or consolidate their play-off berth at the very least. The 25-year-old believes the Wearsider's can take faith from the win over Wigan and put in a good performance against Charlton this weekend.
Speaking to Sunderland's official website, Stewart said: "It was a really important result [against Wigan]. Obviously it stopped the bad run of results that we had. It was a big game and a good following from the fans. It was nice to get the win.
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"It's going to be another tough game. It's always going to be a tough place to go. We've shown on Saturday that we can win on the road, and win on the road well. We've trained well this week and we'll prepare for that properly. Whoever is out there Saturday can hopefully go and win the game."
Alex Neil picked up his first three points of his Sunderland tenure and Stewart believes his Scottish compatriot has already made an impact in such a short space of channel. Stewart said: "I think he's had a really positive impact. You can see in training, an intensity to training. He's already getting his ideas across to the squad and how he wants us to play.
"I think you saw that on Saturday. Tactically, he set us up very well and when we carried it out we got joy from it. We got a really good result against a good, good team in this league."
Stewart has surpassed all expectations since arriving at the Stadium of Light as an unknown quantity over a year ago. The Scottish striker has 22 goals in League One this season and has effortlessly filled the boots left by Charlie Wyke in the last campaign.
He said: "I'm really enjoying my season here. I'm really happy with my goal return so far and there's still games to go. I'm putting demands on myself and I want to add to that.
"We've got to try and make sure the team wins, whether that's me, we've got a lot of quality in the squad and a win on Saturday will do our confidence the world of good. We've got to use that now to go and have a really positive end to the seasons.
"I've enjoyed every one. I always say my favourite goal is the next one, so hopefully there'll be another. I've had a good variation of goals this year. I just love scoring goals so it's good to get the ones that I've got and hope there's more to come.
"At the start of the season I always try to set myself, as a striker, can we get to double digits? Then once I've got to ten, can we got to 15, then 20. At the minute, can I get to 25? If I do that, I'll go from there. That's just how I look at it."
Stewart added: "I've really enjoyed it. The club is a massive club and that speaks for itself. Playing in front of the crowd at all the home games, it's what you want to do when you're growing up, playing in front of crowds that size. I'm really enjoying it. Obviously, away days, we sell out every stadium so there's always a great atmosphere at games.
"The dressing room is really good. The lads have a good bond in there. Everything leads to me being really happy at the club. Hopefully we can use that chemistry to go and have a good end to the season.
"We've got to take huge momentum. It was a big win and we've shown we can do it against a really good team in this league. We've got to take the confidence, we've shown before that once we've got that win we can put together a run of results in this league and we've got to do it now if we've got any aspirations to go and achieve what we want to achieve this season.
"We've got to finish the season strong."
