WARNOCK: IT’S SO TOUGH AT THE DROP NOW

vkick-off, 5pm

NEIL WARNOCK reeled off the fallen Premier League sides threatened with dropping to League One: “Hull, Huddersfield, Stoke and us, Boro... all big clubs, lots of fans.”

And all separated by two points in the bottom six.

The Championship relegation battle is set to throw up major casualties who not long ago were earning £100million a year in the top flight – and who could be facing financial meltdown in the third tier.

“Lots of clubs have gone down and not come back for years. Look at Sunderland now. It is a hard situation,” said Warnock (above), less than a week since he took over at Middlesbrough.

“The third tier, it is much further back from there. You lose your best players when you go down, you have to sell them all. That is why we have to put bodies on the line to stay up now. People don’t realise how difficult it is to get back.

“We have to die to stop that happening. You can ask how and why. Well, sometimes you need a fight like this for the club to regroup.”

Warnock won his first game as Boro boss at Stoke on Saturday and tonight he faces Hull in another six-pointer.

He jokes on the training pitch and off it, saying he has yet to agree his salary with chairman Steve Gibson: “He gave me a lovely meal on my first night here so maybe that was it!”

But Warnock has also injected a ruthless seriousness.

He added: “I never get a club that’s doing well. I get the strugglers. But I have a formula. You convince the players it is the right way. They have to believe in you. I hope they think 71 years old, look at him, if I can’t work hard for that guy.

“They know the rules. They have to do more than they think possible.”