Tony Mowbray explains where Sunderland stand in the transfer market & makes Ellis Simms admission

Everton are searching for a successor to Frank Lampard and saw their attempts to strengthen their forward line by signing Arnaut Danjuma fail when he opted to join Spurs.

Sunderland are known to be in a very competitive race to try and sign Leeds United's hugely-talented young striker Joe Gelhardt to offer cover and competition for Ross Stewart.

Genk striker Andras Nemeth, who was a long-term target for the Black Cats, is expected to soon sign for HSV Hamburg.Mowbray said Sporting Director Kristjaan Speakman was working all hours to secure more depth.

"I'm still hopeful, some of these deals are not easy to do as I've said before in this window," Mowbray said.

"Some are coming close and some of them are drifting away, but I'm still very hopeful that we will add at least one striking option before the end of the window and hopefully it will be a very good one.

"It would be dangerous to potentially go into 18 league games with one out-and-out striker, and it would be nice to take some of the burden off Ross where he has to play 90 minutes of every single game. We will hopefully get one or potentially two in to do that.

"With what's going on at Everton, it looks pretty unlikely that Ellis will be coming back - they haven't got a manager and if I was going in there, I'd want to see all the players on the grass and see if they might be able to help. That looks like a really tight thing to rely on, because he might well not come back.

"So our job is to cover all our bases so that we have at least one, if not two, additional strikers in the building."

Mowbray says Sunderland will not break from their strategy but after seeing Corry Evans ruled out for the rest of the season with an ACL injury, he made clear that he feels reinforcements are crucial if the club are to have a chance of sustaining any tilt at the top six.

One player heavily linked with a move is Lille winger Isaac Lihadji.

"He's a young boy who has been on our list, and I've seen the footage and the presentations," Mowbray said.

"There's nothing to say just yet, and it's not right for me to talk about individuals at the moment. We're trying to bring attacking options in, we might bring in a midfielder if we can, we might even bring a defender in - let's see what the window brings in.

"I think there's an opportunity with us a point outside the play-offs, not to be cavalier but to try and help the situation as we go along so that we don't fall away because we lose our one striker or because we lose come control because we haven't got that experienced midfielder.

"But as I've said all along, there's no pressure to get into that top six this year, we have to keep building and keep giving these youngsters the chances to improve."