Alex Neil insists he is making no plans beyond the end of the season - with Sunderland's play-off campaign his sole focus. Head coach Neil, who took over in February, has just six games in which to secure a top six finish, and with it a chance of promotion.
And until Sunderland know which division they will be in next season, he says all transfer plans, player contract extensions, and talk of longer-term goals, have been parked to allow him and his squad to concentrate on the task at hand. Neil said: "Tomorrow is long-term at the moment!
"We are getting through one day, and then planning the next. I'm not planning any further than the end of the season. At this moment in time, my immediate plans are short term: win the games, see what we can do. I'm not planning for the summer. I'm not planning beyond the summer. I'm not doing any of that at the moment. My only focus is on winning the next game."
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Sunderland have a number of players coming to the end of their current contracts, including Bailey Wright, Aiden McGeady, Patrick Roberts, Lynden Gooch, Lee Burge, and Jordan Willis, but Neil says all contract talks have been put on the back burner. He said: "No discussions are taking place with any player.
"Everybody was spoken to when I walked in the building and I told them all: 'whatever you agenda looks like, whatever you dynamics are, park it', because our sole focus at the moment is to try and finish the season as well as we can. Once we get to the end of the season, if we are successful in what we are trying to achieve, every single person will be in a better place to renegotiate a contract, move onto another club if that what their desire is, or potentially stay here if that is what they desire."
Regardless of which division Sunderland find themselves next term, the squad will need to be strengthened and Neil has acknowledged that, even if he has yet to start making detailed plans. However he is adamant that the pool of players he has available now is good enough to achieve promotion.
"This team that I have currently got has got good balance to it," he said. "There are certain gaps in it, which I've spoken about before, and there's no point going over old ground because unfortunately there is nothing we can do about that at this stage of the season.
"I'm utilising the tools that I have at my disposal and, like with any team, naturally you are going to have some key strengths and some weaknesses. My job is to accentuate the key strengths and mask the weaknesses and make sure we can cover for them, whether it be through personnel, shape, strategy, or a combination of all of those.
"We need to make sure that the parts we are very good at, we make even better, and that we can compensate for the weaker areas and that's very difficult with any team and it depends on the opposition, too. That's probably why the team has fluctuated so much from game to game, because I've looked at what is necessary to win the game and I've picked the team accordingly.
"That's what I'll continue to do between now and the end of the season. Unfortunately for me, I haven't had a pre-season where you get your base in and everybody understands it, and equally I haven't had the opportunity to recruit certain players that maybe suit a certain way of doing things.
"But this squad that I have currently got is certainly capable of bringing us success this season and that makes me really confident in what we are trying to do."
This will be Sunderland's fourth attempt at getting out of the third tier, having twice fallen short in the play-offs, while they missed out on a top six finish during the Covid-curtailed 2019-20 season. Neil says past failures have no bearing on the current season, and instead the club needs to take an air of confidence into these final weeks of the season, starting this weekend when they take on play-off rivals Oxford United at the Kassam Stadium.
"If you want to erradicate all the surrounding hullaballoo, the highest the club has finished in this spell in League One is fourth - it's a myth that we've been close to getting automatic [promotion] for so many years and we've just fallen short," he said. What we need to do is try and get ourselves into the play-offs, never mind all the past worries, concerns, failures, and focus on the games at hand.
"You have to be careful not to let negativity and 'what ifs' get in the way, because if you live your life like that you'll never get anywhere. Oxford is a key game, so let's focus on Oxford. Is it the end of the world if we don't win? No.
"But would it be a concern for me? Of course it would. I'm not going to wake up in the middle of the night worrying about it, though.
"What I'm going to do is pick my team, get them ready for it, and go into the game expecting to win."
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