Black Cats look for better luck against Fulham

SUNDERLAND head for Fulham today refusing to accept that relegation from the Premiership is an inevitability.

They should have claimed maximum points against Everton on New Year’s Eve but instead ended with nothing, Everton snatching a stoppage-time winner through Tim Cahill.

After 10 defeats in 11 Premiership games, Mick McCarthy’s side are rooted to the bottom of the table with just six points from 19 games.

They will require somewhere near five times that return from their remaining 19 games to stand a chance of staying up, but defender Danny Collins refuses to give up the fight.

“There’s no point in us coming in every day if we think we are already down,” he said.

“There’s a long way to go yet. There are 19 games and there are three or four teams around us who are getting dragged in with us, so if we can string a few results together, hopefully we can catch them.”

Sunderland deserved at least one goal for their second-half performance against the Toffees, but they could not translate pressure and chances into tangible reward and Cahill’s winner, two minutes into stoppage time, had something of the inevitable about it.

It came despite Everton being dreadful after the interval, and but for Nigel Martyn’s superb one-handed stop from Anthony Le Tallec, they might have headed home with nothing. Instead they climbed to 16th place, three points clear of the drop zone and now 14 points better off than Sunderland.

Sunderland are seven points adrift of Birmingham in 19th place and a further four shy of third-bottom Portsmouth.

A despondent McCarthy, who should not need reminding that a 1-0 defeat at Fulham on March 1, 2003 accounted for his predecessor Howard Wilkinson, was justifiably proud of the performance of his players.

“What has been good about the lads is that they have kept their spirits up throughout what has been a tough time for us, losing games,” he said.

“On Saturday, but for a bit of luck or a bit of bad marking, we should have won the game.”

McCarthy’s record - his side have now lost 24 of the 28 Premiership games for which he has been in charge - might have cost him his job at many other clubs but there were supportive chants from the Sunderland fans on Saturday.

“The crowd has been fantastic,” said McCarthy. “They deserve better results. But all we can do is keep playing like that and try to get them.”