Pre-season and fixtures - Phil’s Q&A continues...
Football and fixtures – Phil Smith answers more of your questions...
When are we likely to find out Sunderland’s fixture list?
The indications are it will be towards the end of next week.
The Premier League are set to announce their fixtures on August 21st and pretty much right the way through these last six months, the EFL have been in step with them.
So I’d expect it to be around then.
One of the things to look out for is the Carabao Cup, with some suggestions that this could actually get under way just a week after that 21st date.
That’s because the weekend of September 5th is an international break, so any Championship clubs could have to play their first round fixture a week before then.
We’ll see how it all pans out but we should know an awful lot more by the end of next week.
How is Sunderland’s preseason shaping up?
The squad have been back in full contract training for a little while now and the staff certainly seem pleased with their progress physically.
It should step up with the start of some sort of games programme in the next week.
Part of the issue there is that there’s understandably a reluctance to face sides who are not currently in a testing programme.
I’d expect at some stage Sunderland will want to play at the Stadium of Light, to try and get a sense of how things will be in the ‘new normal’ that we’ll see at the start of the season. Pretty much all Championship clubs did that before their restart earlier in the summer.