Chris Coleman: Sunderland is going to be '˜heart-attack city' but we'd have lost that by five not long ago

For weeks now, the Black Cats boss has challenged his players to stand up and play on the front foot.

While results are yet to turn, performances have improved.

It looked like his side were heading for another galling defeat, to MIddlesbrough on Saturday, when Joel Asoro was denied by Darren Randolph late on, but Callum McManaman’s 96th-minute finish sparked wild celebrations.

Coleman said: “I thought that [Asoro] was the chance. You always get one little chance and he saved it and I thought, ‘We’re not going to do it’.

“But once we get the corner you are thinking ‘it would be nice’, and it was a fabulous feeling (when McManaman scored).

“That, for seconds, feels like a win, just for seconds, because of the nature of it.

“Of course, we only came away with a poin,t but it felt… How many times have you seen us fold when we’ve been in a losing position.

“There’s only one thing you can’t forgive players from and that’s if they give up. That’s unforgivable.

“You can play really well and lose, but you can come off and go, ‘Well, actually, there’s not much more we can do there’.

“It’s a horrible feeling when you come off and you’ve missed the 90 minutes because you’ve tried to sneak through it.

“That’s a terrible feeling and we’ve had it once a twice.

“So when you come off and have a go, what do you say to that? We’ve got a point, we didn’t get three, disappointed we didn’t get three but we’ve got a point, we had a fight, we had a scrap.

“We are not going to get away from where we are by going through a back door, I know that.

“This is going to go down to the wire.

“It’s going to be heart attack city every weekend, which I’m not looking forward to, but it’s coming.

“And it’s going to be a fight.

“If you go into a fight on your hands and knees, trying to crawl out of it, you are going to get kicked in the backside.

“You’ve just got to stand your ground and swing back.

“In the last two games, we’ve started swinging punches back.

“It might make me sound like a Neanderthal, like a caveman, but we are in a relegation dogfight and you’ve got to show up every week.

“You can’t just show up for 45 minutes.

“Home is hard for us, tough luck is hard for a reason, we haven’t helped ourselves out, we are where we are, we have to face that, but we faced that (on Saturday).

“Away at Bolton (in last Tuesday’s 1-0 defeat), we were really good.

“We pass the ball better away from home because we haven’t got the home fans to disappoint as much as sometimes we do.

“We’ve got no choice now, where we are. There’s no gradually finish here, there or anywhere.

“Fourth from bottom, we’ve swam the channel from where we are, right now with the games left.

“There are four or five teams, maybe only four now in our league and we’ve got to top that league, it’s as simple as that.”

Coleman feels that the mood in the dressing room has improved after the late equaliser and that his team have made positive steps forward in the last two games.

He said: “It felt a bit more positive. We are still disappointed we didn’t get three points, but my words to them were, ‘Ten days ago we would have lost that by four or five, with the way we were playing and the mood we were in’.

“I know there’s been a lot said about formations and this, that and the other.

“But I say again it’s state of mind and it’s mentality.

“If you really want something to work, you will make it work.

“Formations and tactics, yeah, they can help but where we are, it’s all about heart, it’s about courage and personality and mentality, state of mind, all those old-fashioned words.

“We’ve just got to have plenty of that and we will give ourselves a real good chance.”