Sunderland boss Paolo di Canio admits they must be smarter with their approach after suffering another red card in the draw with Stoke City.

The volatile Italian watched his team suffer the second red card in a row as Craig Gardner was sent off for a horrible lunge on Stoke's Charlie Adam.

Di Canio said: "It is obvious that I love passion, I love the heart, but if we are going to improve it is obvious we have to handle our aggression. I hope we are not going to make other mistakes.

"We have to stop what we did last week and this week in terms of yellow and red cards. That will put us in trouble and we don't need to help other teams, we need to help ourselves."