Chris Coleman insists he has not given up on survival fight despite Aston Villa shocker

The Black Cats travel to Loftus Road tomorrow to face a QPR side who have won just one of their last five league games.

Coleman was despondent after watching his side fold on Tuesday, but he says they are ‘nowhere near’ being out of contention for survival yet.

He said: “I always look at myself and think ‘maybe I got that wrong, that formation, that player for this game’, but then I do that when we win – sometimes I think ‘I’ve got away with it there’.

“Unless it is one of those games where everything goes great, you analyse things and ask whether you made the right substitution, did you bring him on too early or too late?

“But I’ll never ever give up, I’ll never ever lose hope, even if it might have looked that way on Tuesday night because I was just so disappointed.

“That’s gone now, and I have to put all my energy and optimism into Saturday.

“I’ll only sit there and say ‘that’s it’ when it is it, if we can’t mathematically do anything.

“That’s when I’ll say I gave it my best shot and we didn’t have enough. But that’s nowhere near yet.

“Maybe we haven’t earned enough because we haven’t won in eight games, but the gap is still only four points – the other teams around us haven’t exactly been pulling up trees either.

“Somebody will and I hope and pray – and I have to make sure – that it’s us. It’s there for us to go and do that because people have written us off.

“The negativity here is immense, huge – look at me on Tuesday night, wallop.

“But then it’s gone and I am back and ready to go again and have a tear-up with QPR.”