Ahead of this evening’s match at Stratford, manager Tim Flowers has talked about Saturday’s FA Cup win and, firstly, the task at hand here…
We go into this game on a good run – we’re in a good place, which is easy to say, but not so easy to follow up. There are always bumpy roads around the corner in football and, as I said after the game on Saturday, I’m always looking at the ‘what ifs?’ and how we deal with everything – at the moment, we’re doing okay, clearly.
Stratford will be a really tough game – they’re a local team to us, and I know a bit about them. I know a lot of their players – certainly the XI that went out on Friday at Worcester – which was extremely similar to what they had last year. They had a frenzy of signings in the summer – they brought a lot of lads in.
I listen to a lot of managers and interviews and what they have to say, as you can always glean information from them – we all do that. It was interesting to hear what Stratford were saying in the summer and certainly what they were saying about us to a certain extent. There seemed to be – in pre-season – a lot of attention on what we were doing. I don’t know why, quite frankly, because we’re not a massive local derby for them but – the truth is – it’ll be an incredibly tough game. I’ll never say a fixture this season isn’t a tough game.
I know that if we don’t rock up in the right frame of mind and attack the game in a positive manner and do what we do, we’ll get beat. But if we do rock up and we attack the game, then it’ll be a really good football match.
They’ve got some good players, a good manager, and it’s a good football club – they’ve got a lovely pitch and a lovely stadium that has been built over the years. I understand what we’re up against.
We come into this off the back of a win in the cup against Leek where, I thought we were okay. It was very similar to the Nuneaton game for me – a very similar performance; creating, but missing, chances and sometimes giving it away too much when we didn’t need to – but that’s just my opinion on the game and I don’t care what anybody else thinks – and that’s that.
We’re thick and fast for a month now – we’ve got Saturday-Tuesday, Saturday-Tuesday for another four or five weeks – it’s really going to stretch the squad, so we need to make sure that we’re diligent in terms of everything else that goes with it. But this is a huge game for us – we have to go and produce our best football to get any kind of result; I’m fully aware of that and that’s what we’ll try and endeavour to do.
