Fabio Borini Hoping to Add to His First Goal of the Season for Sunderland

​Despite seeing his side suffer yet another defeat last weekend, Sunderland striker Fabio Borini was delighted to finally get off the mark this season, with his first goal since signing with the Black Cats on a permanent basis.

Speaking to ​the Shields Gazette after the 3-1 loss to his former club Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, Borini said, "Obviously the result is the one that counts, but my first goal is important after all the hard work I’ve done in the past few months and the bad things that happened last season.

"Hopefully this is the first of many. After that goal, we changed the intensity and started to press and we had more personality to get the ball into feet and cause them problems, rather than just hitting it long.

"Obviously they were confident at 3-0 and probably cooled a bit down, but we changed our attitude, which you need to have if you’re going to fight relegation. 

"You can see this year that there are not any obvious results because Newcastle and Bournemouth have beaten the big teams. You can’t rely on other teams losing. We need to focus on ourselves, not on other."

The Italian international came off the bench at half time, with the score at 2-0 to the Blues, but his close ranged strike proved to only be a consolation, with Sam Allardyce's side remaining in the drop zone for the festive period.

Allardyce was equally disappointed with the run of form his side are producing, "We’re deeper in the mire from having played 17 games and got 12 points. If we’d have beaten Watford, we’d have been on 15 points after 16 games, and I’d have accumulated 12 points in my first eight games, which would have been mega. We failed that miserably, and that, for me, was the bigger disappointment than Chelsea."