Mike Dodds has this message for Sunderland supporters after another Championship defeat

Mike Dodds says he hopes Sunderland fans can see light at the end of the tunnel despite his side's fifth defeat in a row on Tuesday night.

The Black Cats fell behind to an early Jamie Vardy goal but improved considerably in the second half, and Dodds said he felt his side had shown they had not given up on their campaign despite falling ten points from sixth position.

"I don't think that was a team, especially in that last hour, that has given up on achieving what we want to achieve," Dodds said.

"If you were a neutral and didn't know who the teams were, I think you'd pick Sunderland from that second half as the team at the top of the table. I genuinely feel that with each game I've worked with them, we've got better. I do feel they're in an OK spot, they're human and they've lost five games and we're all aware of that, but I genuinely feel we are one win away from putting a run together. So my message would be that we've got to stick together, the players have shown they're together and I'm completely on board with them. We've got to give the fans something to go home happy and we know that, but I think the performance showed that there is some light at the end of the tunnel."

Sunderland are now closer to the bottom three than they are the top six but Dodds said that had not entered his thinking, and that he was confident that would soon change if his team replicated their second-half performance in the coming weeks.

"It's not a worry, if we perform like that week in, week out we'll roll over a lot of teams," he said.

"What the players have done is set a really high bar and shown they can perform that they can at a high level. That hasn't even come into my mind in terms of being closer to one end than the other, because I work with them every day and I know the quality I see."