Connor Wickham says Sunderland are looking to climb the table rather than concern themselves with a relegation battle. "We're looking at who we can catch," forward Wickham told BBC Newcastle.
"We're not looking down, we're looking at who we can suck in and put in the fight instead of ourselves."
Their survival hopes rest on the final seven games, three of them coming against sides in the bottom half of the table.
"You look at last season and it says it all - we beat Manchester United, we beat Chelsea away and we drew with Manchester City," said Wickham, 22.
"I don't think we need to write the last two games off at all, we've got important games coming up that we need to take points from.
"If we take the points from the games coming up, we can be in a positive mind going into the last two."