DAN NEIL insists Sunderland’s senior players are determined not to slacken off in the remaining seven games of the Championship season.

The weekend’s results mean the Black Cats remain seven points adrift of the play-off positions, but while there is still an outside chance of sneaking into the end-of-season shootout, there is a general acceptance that Tony Mowbray’s side are likely to end the campaign in a mid-table position.

As a result, Mowbray is set to use the remaining seven matches as an opportunity to blood some of his untried youngsters, but while Neil understands the desire to experiment, he also maintains that Sunderland’s senior players will not allow the season to drift to an end.

“We want to bed in young players and want to give them a taste, but we are still professionals at the end of the day, and we want to finish as high as we possibly can,” said the Black Cats midfielder. “Every single game, we are going into it wanting to win.

“It is a bit of a free hit, the last few weeks our performance levels have probably dipped a little bit, definitely the results. We’ve come out of this international break and it’s a free hit, but like I said, we’re all professionals and we want to finish as high as we possibly can in the league.

“We don’t want to finish the season with games that mean nothing. We want to be striving to finish as high as we can.”

Neil was part of the Sunderland side that held runaway league leaders Burnley to a goalless draw at Turf Moor on Friday night.

Having won at Norwich City in their previous away game, the Black Cats became the first side to prevent Burnley from scoring in a home game all season as they defended superbly and carried a threat on the counter-attack.

Matches against West Brom and Watford mean Sunderland will have a say in the outcome of the play-off fight, and Neil admits he and his team-mates appear to raise their standards when they take on the leading teams in the league.

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“I think against teams like that (Burnley) this year, we’ve been really good,” he said. “Obviously, we knew how good they were coming into the game and felt how good they were in the second half of the game at home.

“Similar to Norwich, the lads put in a massive shift, the shape was really good and we could even have nicked it on the counter-attack and had some good chances. It was a brilliant all-round performance, and now it’s on to the next one.”