Sunderland defender John O'Shea has warned his teammates that they must "front up" quickly or risk getting drawn into a relegation battle.

Yesterday's 3-1 defeat at Queens Park Rangers means that the Black Cats are now just six points clear of the Premier League drop zone.

"We have to pick ourselves up very quickly," said O'Shea. "We had a great start to the game and led 1-0, but they got a bit of luck for the equaliser.

"[Andros] Townsend scored a pretty good goal to put them 2-1 up, but we definitely should have done better with the last goal. Even with the second goal, we could maybe have stopped it beforehand.

"If we'd done that, we would have caused QPR a few more problems because the home crowd were getting tense. We needed to be cleverer with the ball. We have to front up now. We have a big week and the Norwich game is building up to be massive."

Sunderland have lost four of their last six games, leaving them bottom of the Premier League form table.