Robbie Stockdale believes Sunderland’s pre-season tour of France was a ‘positive’ trip.
The Black Cats worked hard on the training pitch while also playing three games in the Lake Geneva region, beating Stade Nyonnais and Dijon FCO while drawing 1-1 with Montpellier HSC.
Sunderland’s final pre-season outing comes on Friday with a trip to Austria to take on German giants Borussia Dortmund, and speaking to safc.com the first-team coach hailed the schedule’s progression.
“It’s been a good week,” said Stockdale. “The game progressed in terms of the quality of opposition and to finish the week still unbeaten in pre-season is a positive.
“There are things we need to work on as we return to the UK, but I think we did a little bit better against Montpellier than we did on Wednesday night so it was a very positive trip.”
Stockdale also provided an update on the fitness of Jermain Defoe following a scan, while also revealing the latest on Billy Jones, Patrick van Aanholt and Jan Kirchhoff.
“I will be perfectly honest, Jermain has been for his scan and we’re all hopeful it’s not as bad as first feared.
“I wouldn’t want to put a date on it but Jermain will be eager to be back fit as soon as possible, and although we won’t take risks with him the news we got was positive.”
He added: “Patrick trained a little on Saturday morning and I’m sure he would have played had it been a competitive game.
“Billy came off with a slight strain/ache in his hip and again there was no point in taking a risk, with Jan picking up a bit of a hamstring strain which we will know more about in the coming days.
“It’s not ideal but we have been pushing the lads hard and you do expect to pick up slight injuries in pre-season, but we have been reading reports of other clubs picking up long-term injuries and we certainly don’t have any in that category.
“I would expect most of those players to be fit for when we play Dortmund.”
