What Tony Mowbray said about Alex Neil, Stoke City and Sunderland team news ahead of Championship fixture

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of Tony Mowbray’s pre-match press conference ahead of Saturday’s match against Stoke City.

The Black Cats boss is set to speak to the media at 9am this morning, and we’ll have live updates right here.

Just refresh the page for live updates from the Academy of Light.

We’ll start with the Sunderland team news.

The club are monitoring defender Dennis Cirkin closely after he continued to show symptoms of the nasty concussion he suffered at Millwall last month.

Lynden Gooch also remains a doubt for this weekend’s match, despite returning to the training pitches at the Academy of Light last week following a knee issue. Next weekend’s trip to Norwich may be a more realistic target for the player’s return to action.

Full-back Niall Huggins has also been making a phased return to training, though Sunderland are eager not to push him too quickly.

We should get a further injury update from Mowbray this morning.

Stoke were knocked out of the FA Cup after a 1-0 defeat by Brighton on Tuesday night and sit 17th in the Championship.

Neil should have most of his players available this weekend, yet midfielder Nick Powell remains a doubt after missing recent matches.

Emre Tezgel (quad) and Tom Edwards (knee) are also set to miss out.

“We gave them a few days off and then training of course.

“It was a game every three days and I think sometimes you just have to take a step back from it. Hopefully the break with their families will have benefitted them.

“We did train Tuesday and hopefully we’ll be re-energised and fresh to bring the best version of ourselves at the weekend.”

“I went back to Middlesbrough, went back to Blackburn, teams I spent a few years at.

“I think for the individual, for Alex I’m not sure if he’ll be looking forward to it or there will be a bit of trepidation, I’m not sure. He’ll just want his team to reflect how he wants them to be.

“For us we have our own targets and have lost a couple of games last week and need to get back to winning ways. I’m pretty sure it will be a good football match and a very intense football match

“I think the opposition manager on the other side it’s irrelevant to what really goes on on the pitch really, and we have to find a way to come out on top if we can.

“They will be very determined to pick up points. They are a very attritional team from what I’ve seen, they get the ball forward early.

“I think Stoke City, from the Tony Pulis days really, have always been a difficult, hard-working, honest team. My mind is still like that of Stoke being a little bit like that, a really difficult team to play against ,get the ball forward, put it in your box, ask questions and run hard.

“The bits I’ve watched from them, they are not too far away from that, have good athleticism and I think it will be a difficult game for us.”

“That’s the fine balance really. For whatever reason he made a decision and moved on.

“But it will go in the history books of the football club that he was the manager that got this club out of League One and back into the Championship, and hopefully back on an upward journey towards the Premier League at some stage in the future.

“That is not an easy job to get out of that league, when you look at how tough it is. There were some really big clubs in the division, all sort of scraping and fighting with expectations.

“Sometimes the expectation can weigh you down, and they managed to overcome that and get the job done.”

“I think the atmosphere is always pretty good here and generally teams come and try to slow the game down and make it lots of stoppages, calm the crowd down.

“I’m not sure of the mentality of Alex coming into the game. Having managed teams against his teams a lot over the years I do know his teams, he was only just down the road at Preston when I was at Blackburn.

“What I do know his teams are always intense and they fight for every ball, are very competitive

“I think the crowd will get wrapped up in the match as well because of what goes on on the field. I think it will probably be fest and the whole crowd will be supportive of the team I’m sure.”

“I haven’t really looked at the table. I think we are four points outside. Three points at the weekend and we could find ourselves two points outside with 11 games to go.

“There is still everything to play for but you can’t keep losing games of course.

“We’ll try to get back to winning ways at the weekend, knowing that we are still very much in touch.

“If we wanted to start the season now and say with 12 games to go you are only four points off the play-offs then we’d have probably all taken that.

“We can get disappointed that we haven’t picked up many points last week, but we still have a great opportunity to show what we are all about as a team.”

“I said after the game the other day I felt we didn’t quite have the tools to get the job done.

“I can sit here and be disappointed that Ross Stewart isn’t here, Ellis Simms went back to Everton, it’s history now and we have to get on with what we’ve got.

“I’ve always talked about finding a way to score goals without out-and-out strikers.

“We have to play the way we play because of the players we’ve got and that’s what we’ll continue to do, but find a way to bring a cutting edge to the possession play that we have.”