DAVID MOYES has hinted for the first time that he might be willing to walk away from Sunderland at the end of the season, even though he maintains he is not to blame for the club’s plight at the foot of the Premier League table.

Sunderland’s relegation will be confirmed tomorrow afternoon if they fail to better Hull City’s result at Southampton. Lose, and the Black Cats will be down if Hull pick up at least a point. Draw, and Sunderland will find themselves in the Championship if the Tigers win at St Mary’s.

Even if they string things out for another weekend, it is surely only a matter of time before the Wearsiders’ fate is sealed, and having been subjected to a series of chants calling for his head during Wednesday’s defeat at Middlesbrough, Moyes is braced for another difficult afternoon on the touchline.

The mood at the Stadium of Light has become increasingly mutinous in the last few weeks, with a large section of the Sunderland support blaming Moyes for the club’s current malaise.

The Scotsman has always maintained he has no intention of turning his back on the Stadium of Light, but he today conceded he will hold talks at the end of the season to discuss the future direction of the club, and his own position at the helm.

When asked whether he would definitely be in charge beyond the end of the current campaign, Moyes said: “I would say that I would make that decision at the end of the season. Because at this moment in time, it would be the wrong time to say that (I’ll be here).

“It’s not a seismic change – I just (have) a situation where we need to see how things are at the end of the season. It’s me saying I will assess the situation at the end of the season.

“All we need to do is see where we go. All we can do is finish at the moment and get the highest position we possibly can.”

Ellis Short has shown no desire to remove Moyes from his current position despite Sunderland’s record of just one league win from their last 16 league matches, and the former Everton and Manchester United boss also retains the strong support of managing director Martin Bain.

Bain spoke of the need for stability earlier in the season, and having constantly chopped and changed their manager over the last five or six years, to damaging financial effect, the Sunderland hierarchy have clearly concluded that yet another managerial switch would be counter-productive.

Many Sunderland fans would disagree, contrasting Moyes’ failure to engineer a turnaround in the Black Cats’ fortunes with the success of his predecessors in engineering an escape from a seemingly impossible position.

Moyes’ negativity and poor performance in the transfer market are other criticisms that are regularly levelled at him, but while he admits it is never nice to be subjected to abuse from the sidelines, the attitude of the fans tomorrow will not influence his decision whether to remain in his post.

“Twelve months ago, everyone was saying the best appointment was David Moyes,” he said. “No one was saying it wasn’t. It has changed a bit in the last couple of weeks, maybe before that, because of the position we’re in, but you keep going in these situations.

“You don’t enjoy it, but there’s only one place I want to be on Saturday, and that’s somewhere around my technical area.

“I totally understand the supporters’ frustrations – I am agreeing with them – and it if is the manager who they feel is the reason for the position, fine. I think there are some other reasons – there have been difficulties here for a lot of years.

“I totally appreciate supporters because I’m a football supporter, and I take responsibility. But I also feel the responsibility should be shared and, if it was only directed at the manager, then I would be saying it’s probably not correct. But being a football supporter, the manager is probably an easy target – that’s it. I’m the public front.”

Moyes has always argued he inherited a difficult position from Sam Allardyce, and while some will claim his transfer dealings have contributed to the current crisis, he clearly feels financial constraints are a key mitigating factor in his inability to sufficiently strengthen the squad.

“I think if you look at the amount of players who left last summer – 14 or 15 – there had to be a group of players brought back in,” he said. “For different reasons, a lot of them were free transfers and loan players.

“We probably were not able to do as much business in that part of the season as we would have liked. I think January was the first profit we have had in transfers at this club in any transfer window for quite some time.

“I thought it would be a difficult season because the four previous seasons had been very difficult – I hadn’t seen that we’d invested enough to change that position.”