Sunderland AFC news: Mike Dodds discusses head coach's job, team news and Swansea match

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of Mike Dodds' pre-match press conference ahead of Saturday's match against Swansea.

Sunderland's interim head coach is set to speak to the media at 2pm today, and we'll have live updates from the Academy of Light.

Stick around and refresh the page for the latest SAFC news.

We'll start with the Sunderland team news.

Dan Ballard is set to miss the side's next two matches against Swansea and Norwich after picking up his 10th yellow card of the season at Birmingham last week, resulting in a two-match suspension.

Jack Clarke is a big doubt for this weekend's match after picking up a foot injury, with the extent of the issue still unclear.

Callum Styles could be available for the first time after undergoing a minor surgery in January to remove his appendix.

Patrick Roberts (hamstring), Bradley Dack (hamstring), Aji Alese, Elliot Embleton (ankle), Dennis Cirkin (hamstring), Corry Evans (ACL) and Niall Huggins (knee) remain unavailable for this weekend’s match.

"The Jack Clarke one is an interesting one. I’m not a big social media person and am only getting things second and third hand. The information I get from social media is a lot worse than what it is.

"Jack rolled his ankle against Birmingham, obviously played 90 minutes and was super relaxed. The plan was for him to have a couple of days off and train Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. That hasn’t happened so I think the game tomorrow is probably going to come too early for him, then we’ll assess where we are on Monday. I don’t think the out for a month, I think that has been a little bit more sensationalised than it is.

"Leo is fine so I don’t know where that has come from."

"Callum has trained fully for the last two weeks and will be in the squad for tomorrow."

“Pat is still a few weeks away. Pat’s not out on the grass yet. 

“Corry trained with us this morning. He’s been doing little bits with the under-21s. When I say trained with us I don’t want people to get carried away with that. It was very much bit-part training. It’s welcome news to see someone of Corry’s calibre training with us.

“Aji and Dacky were out there as well. They part trained with the sports science department then did a little bit with us.”

“Jenson in the Leeds performance in particular I thought was excellent on the night. I made a call to change the way we set up which meant Jenson came out of the team.

“Jenson deserves to have an opportunity to have a run of games in the team to show us where he’s at. He’s trained really well and hopefully in the next few games he can show everyone how good he is.”

"Without giving too much away, it will be an opportunity for me to maybe tweak and change a few things. I think last time, and I mean this respectfully, I showed I will make decisions that I feel is best for the group.

"When you have someone like Jack who has been taken out of the team, you have to try and come up with solutions to that. The next few games will be really interesting in terms of team selection."

“There’s still a lot of football to be played. The league has shown that anyone in the league can lose back-to-back games, so even the teams in front of us are not not within touching distance. 

“We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. It’s not lost on me the magnitude of the football club and the expectation. We’ve got to live up to that. Whether we are good enough or not good enough, that’s the aspiration.”

“The performances aren’t as poor as their position in the table. It’s going to be a really tough game against a really good coach. He did really, really well at Notts County.

You can see in terms of how he sets his team up they are really well coached. When you look at the Championship now and just the league table, you could have a counter argument to that. Swansea is going to be a really, really tough game. They have a certain style of play, a certain brand of football and a really bright coach.”