Jack Ross: We need to make the Stadium of Light a fortress - 7M sport

Jack Ross: We need to make the Stadium of Light a fortress



Posted Monday, August 20, 2018 by PA

Jack Ross: We need to make the Stadium of Light a fortress

Jack Ross is happy to see his Sunderland side turning the Stadium of Light into a fortress after a lengthy spell in which the club could barely win a home game.

This time last year, the Black Cats were in the middle of a 12-month run in which they failed to record a single home victory, but today’s convincing 3-0 win over Scunthorpe means they have claimed two wins out of two from their league games on home soil this term.

Max Power, Josh Maja and Chris Maguire were on target as Sunderland maintained their unbeaten start to the League One season, and Ross was delighted to see a crowd of almost 30,000 supporters revelling in another home success.

“One of the things I believed I could try to address straight away was how we play in this stadium and the results we get here,” he said. “We hammer home the importance to the players all the time of making this a place where opponents dread coming to.

“I’ve been there myself, when I’ve been to Ibrox and Parkhead as a player in Scotland, they were horrible at times to go to because you knew what you would face in terms of the standard of the opposition and the way they would play.

“If they started in that manner, you knew the crowd would get behind them. It was difficult, you almost feel like you can’t breathe.

“That’s what we need to do to teams here. It’s easy to talk about it, but the next part is doing that on the pitch.

“I think what we’ve seen so far is a group that are trying to do that and play in a manner with high energy levels, getting after teams and playing in a really expansive manner.

“It’s just a start for us, but we want to make it a place where teams will look at the results and think they don’t want to come here.”

Scunthorpe struggled from the outset, with Sunderland scoring all three of their goals before the interval leaving manager Nick Daws to admit the experience of playing at the Stadium of Light might have been too much for some of his players.

Daws said: “Did the players struggle to deal with the occasion? I don’t know the answer to that. I would hope not because, as a group, I think we’ve got players who should be able to deal with coming to the Stadium of Light and playing in front of 30,000 people.

“But in the first half in particular, we weren’t aggressive enough. That said though, I think we should have had a penalty when it was 0-0, and maybe if we get that and score, the whole atmosphere might have been different.”

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