Mike Dodds has explained the ‘crushing blow’ of Jack Clarke’s injury situation after it was revealed the Sunderland winger will be out for up to six weeks with an ankle ligament injury.

Sunderland are set to be without Clarke until April after the club confirmed the 23-year-old suffered ankle ligament damage in the defeat to Birmingham City earlier this month.

Clarke was missing for the first time this season as a result in last weekend’s 2-1 defeat to Swansea City at the Stadium of Light – although Dodds had hinted that initial fears around the severity of the injury were wide of the mark.

But after reassessing Clarke’s issue earlier this week, it was confirmed Sunderland’s leading goalscorer will be out of action for six weeks, putting a severe dent in Sunderland’s dwindling play-off hopes.

“He played 90 minutes at Birmingham and rolled his ankle in the game. When I spoke to him the plan was to train later on in the week, but the swelling just didn’t come down,” Dodds explaiend.

“Jack was upbeat, and the feedback was semi-positive, but it came to early in the week and the rate of progress wasn’t what we expected or hoped so we made a decision for him to go and see a specialist on Wednesday morning to find out what was going on and the feedback is the feedback, which is a crushing blow.

“But at the same time, I’ve got to control the controllables and it’s something now for the next six weeks that won’t be in my head or in my thoughts. Like I’ve said a thousand times, it’s not just a blow for us, Jack Clarke would be a massive blow for any team in this league."

Dodds added: “For someone who is a week into the role, it’s not the news you want. When you get that information, you’re not skipping down the road. But my mindset is that I can only control what I can control and once you have the initial information my thought process goes to doubling down on what we’re doing and really focusing on the next few games and let’s show people, regardless of Jack – and I mean that respectfully, how good we are. And that’s where my focus has been.

"After that initial one or two minutes of puffing my cheeks out a little bit, I haven’t really thought about it again because my focus has been on Saturday and preparing the team to go to Norwich and come back with three points.

Sunderland face a difficult run of games heading into the Championship’s final international break of the season, starting with the trip to Carrow Road on Saturday before fixtures with Leicester City and Southampton.

Ahead of their trip to Norfolk, Sunderland are eight points adrift of sixth place in the Championship table after what was a challenging return to the dugout for interim head coach Dodds against Swansea.

Dodds looked to counteract Clarke’s absence at the Stadium of Light by a change in system which came unstuck as Sunderland fell to a 15th defeat of the season. But Dodds was again keen to stress the importance of not putting too much expectancy on a direct replacement for Clarke during this period of games the winger will be missing.

"Some weeks we might play with wingers, some weeks we might not,” he said. “In terms of a direct replacement then no, there isn’t a direct replacement - not just in this football club but probably in the whole league.

“He's one of the best one or two wingers in the league and if you were talking about the best player full stop, you could also argue he's in that conversation. So we have to come up with a slightly different way of playing, some other ideas, to get the most out of the other players we have who can play in that area of the pitch.”

Dodds has been boosted this week by the return to training of club captain Corry Evans as well as both Aji Alese and Bradley Dack, but all three remain away from being in contention to feature.

"Corry is back in full training but we need to treat that with a level of caution because he has been out for over a year,” said Dodds. “He has been back in training and it's great to have him out there in terms of his experience and his know-how.

"Aji and Dacky are not far away. They're not joining in fully yet but they are taking part in some of the training. So there is a bit of light at the end of the tunnel with some of them, but in terms of this weekend it's going to be a similar type of squad."