Wembley not on minds of Sunderland players just yet

The Black Cats’ main goal is to secure a swift return to the Championship and Ross will be sending out a team to face Stoke City’s Under-21s to reflect that at the Stadium of Light.

But Ross still wants to see his players push for the victories to stay in the competition, with the final held at Wembley.

This is Sunderland’s first experience of playing in the competition properly since 1988 when they lost in the Sherpa Van Trophy to Hartlepool United at Roker Park, having had their Under-21s play in it last year when they were a Championship club.

As a League One club it is a first team competition and Ross will be using the visit of Stoke to give a number of players lacking match action some game time to build up their fitness – including striker Charlie Wyke, who struck the equaliser on his debut against Oxford.

“I think we have to be respectful of the competition, it’s important to stress that,” said Ross. “It’s silverware, it’s an opportunity to get to the national stadium. It’s a sponsored tournament, there’s all these different reasons.

“Again, for me, it’s learning about the number of games you have. But the good thing for me is we’ve had a number of young players involved in our squads through the opening matches because of the injuries we’ve had.

“Now we’re getting the senior players back a lot of them will play on Tuesday but a lot of them are first-team players – not just here, but they have been in the past.

“We’ll make a lot of changes but we’ll be strong. Charlie, Tom Flanagan, Dylan McGeouch, Reece James and Alim Ozturk, guys like that will probably need more game-time so we’ll look at that. We will be fairly strong again.”

Those Ross named have all been in and out of the side because of injury, with the exception of Wyke who arrived from Bradford in a £1m deal nursing a knee problem. The former Middlesbrough forward explained after his debut that he was keen to face Stoke to build up his sharpness.

After tonight’s game Sunderland will then face Carlisle in October at the Stadium of Light and then travel to Morecambe to complete the fixtures in the northern section’s Group A of the Trophy.

“Do you know what, right now Wembley is so far away it's not something I can seriously think about,” said Ross. “Everything I do is game to game and the priority and the ambition for me is to win the league this season. I've already seen how challenging that's going to be.

“At the moment it's just about figuring out the best team, winning the game on Tuesday and continuing to remain undefeated in terms of this stadium (except the League Cup).”

As well as those Ross has hinted will face Stoke, he is also expected to hand some football to a number of the club’s young guns. Denver Hume, Ethan Robson and Luke Molyneux are among those who should figure.

Two players who will not be part of the plans are Didier Ndong and Papy Djilobodji. Both are expected back on Wearside after spending the summer away from the club trying to engineer a move.

However, even though there are overseas windows still open this month, it now seems certain that they will be back at the Academy of Light and Sunderland are seeking advice over how to deal with the situation.

There has been a lot of change at the club since the end of last season when Sunderland suffered the second of back-to-back relegations. Stewart Donald, the owner who took over from Ellis Short, has gone about repairing relationships with the fans and helping Ross to change the face of the squad.

Donald has now made a couple more additions to his board of directors.  Tony Davison has been formally made a director having joined as managing director in May.

Now they have also brought in Neil Fox as a director because of his long-standing relationship with Donald as a business partners.

Sunderland already had Monaco businessman Juan Sartori, executive director Charlie Methven and finance director Angela Lowes on the board.