I think it’s very important that they know. I think the lads know and I always speak to them and explain the reasoning behind it. The manager was asked about the challenge of rotating his squad and managing the minds of players who have lost their place in the starting XI. Yeah, we’ve got to play Plymouth, Portsmouth and Ipswich, and we’ve tasted some of them, if you get on a seam early enough and you get confidence going and you’ve got a solid chin, which we showed on Tuesday night we can be – and the opponent will get better than MK for sure, the tests will get harder than that, but we can only beat what’s in front of us and we’ve got to continue in that vein at Cheltenham on Saturday.
I’m looking now and we’re five points outside the play-offs, a week can change football. I think it will get us where we want to go, which is into a really positive position in the table. You have to be fit and for our lads we maintain fitness by utilisation of the squad. Physical fitness now at the top level is what dictates the game. It’s a problem if you don’t get them beat in nine rounds, you’ve got three more rounds. It’s like a boxer only being fit for nine rounds. As I say, I know that all too well having inherited a 70-minute team, and I’m being kind to the lads of previous regimes by saying they were a 70-minute team, I don’t even think they were that.Īt that point, if you could only make three subs as we could at the time and you’ve got six lads running out of energy with 20 or 30 minutes on the clock, then you’re in big trouble. If we drop into 99km run, that is not sustainable for 11 players for 46 games, you’ll start to eat away at their energy and, for me, you know the players are fantastic and playing really well, but if you run out of energy with 20 minutes to go, it doesn’t matter how good you’ve been for the first 70 minutes. I think we did 105km as a team without the keepers on Saturday against Cambridge and I think we were 104km (on Tuesday), so the lads have backed that performance up. Now it’s about maintaining a level of physicality. When I first got here, the biggest problem I had was players weren’t fit for 90-minute performances. They finished really high up in the table and I know they’ve lost Scott Twine, Harry Darling and one or two others, but they had virtually no attempts in their own stadium and for us as young team evolving, I think we will grow in confidence from that. Will Grigg is a good player, Josh McEachran is a good player, Matt Smith done alright at Donny last year, Bradley Johnson has been a good player over the years, so they are no mugs at all, MK. Your goalie, your back four, the spine of your team, and then you can add energy and you can rotate a bit to get high-energy performances from other positions.īut I think to have a solid base to build out on is going to be key, getting those lads back is going to be key and Tuesday night will do no end for that bit of confidence to go and shut a team out. You want to pick a consistent six or seven, I think. We’ve got Trevor Clarke and Lewis Gordon competing at left-back, Luca Hoole and James Gibbons at right-back and then you’ve got Alfie Kilgour, Bobby Thomas, Lewis Gibson and James Connolly in the mix there. The key is we’ve got two players for each position across the backline. Yeah, it’s maybe not great if you’re tuning in and watching the game as a spectator unless you’re a Gashead, but for us it’s about being mature in our performance and on Tuesday night we showed a level of maturity that maybe we haven’t shown in my time here.
I think the performance grew and grew, certainly in the second half, and you’ve got Harry Anderson holding onto the ball for two minutes, that just demoralises the opposition. We would have wanted to create more opportunities, but it was about starving the opposition and demoralising them. It wasn’t the most football aesthetic game to watch, it wasn’t the most inspiring game, but in terms of efficiency and nullifying the opponent with our game plan and what we were trying to do, the lads executed at a really high level. I think we will be tested a lot more at Cheltenham on Saturday and as the weeks go on, I think the tests will get more and more, but they came through the game with aplomb and that’s the reason I put my notes I gave the lads before the game on Instagram this week.
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