Sunderland manager Martin O'Neill will not take Arsenal lightly when the teams meet at the Stadium of Light in the FA Cup.
Black Cats boss expecting a tough challenge
Sunderland manager Martin O'Neill willl not take Arsenal lightly when the teams meet at the Stadium of Light in the FA Cup.
The Gunners come into the contest on the back of a 4-0 beating at the hands of AC Milan in UEFA Champions League action in midweek.
The one-sided result means the North Londoners are on the cusp of exciting the competition, meaning the FA Cup remains their only realistic hope of silverware this season.
Arsenal triumphed at Sunderland in their last Premier League match courtesy of Thierry Henry's late winner and O'Neill says that loss still hurts.
The former Aston Villa boss is reading nothing into Arsenal's midweek drubbing and fully expects Arsene Wenger's men to be giving it their all in the North East on Saturday.
Defeat
"Going into a Champions League game away from home there is always a possibility you could get beaten," he told
Sky Sports.
"If things go badly on the night you could get beaten pretty badly. It's probably something that Arsenal weren't expecting.
"They've recovered from that before in the past. I feel exactly the same, they've got too many good players.
"They beat us last week. They came from behind in that game with about 15 minutes to go, while we've been pretty used ourselves to scoring in the last minute of matches and winning games. We scored pretty late in proceedings a few nights earlier in the cup tie against Middlesbrough.
"I think Arsenal have shown the sort of qualities throughout their time. There's no possibility of me criticising Arsenal for what they have done over the years.
"I think they've qualified for the Champions League every single year for about 13 years. It's extraordinary at the end of it.
Belief
"What people are trying to talk about is winning a cup competition. I believe regardless of the result on Wednesday they would come here feeling that that they are capable of winning not only our game, but the FA Cup in itself.
"They inflicted misery on us last week. They won the game. We have to try and reverse that and win the game. I would have thought the question should be 'What can we do to reverse the trend of losing the game?'.
"I felt maybe in the scheme of things with some of the possession they had in the game, one or two chances we that had ourselves, a draw would have been a fair result. That wasn't the case.
"We ourselves have to try and win a game. We've got an advantage because we're at home. We've got the crowd behind us at this moment and we would want to try and utilise every advantage we had."
