Ahead of tonight’s league match versus Stratford, manager Tim Flowers has reflected on Saturday’s FA Cup win and looked at 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’s always bumpy roads around the corner in football – I always look for 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 and I know a little bit about them and their players – especially the XI that played at Worcester on Friday – which was extremely similar to what they had last year. They had a frenzy of signings in the summer and I listen to a lot of interviews and managers all listen to each other, as you can always glean information. I was interesting to hear what they were saying in the summer and especially about us, to a certain extent. There seemed to be – in the middle of pre-season – some attention on what we was doing. I don’t know why, quite frankly, because we’re not a massive local derby for them.
The truth is, it’ll be an incredibly tough game – I’ll never say this season that a fixture 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, then we’ll get beat. But if we do rock up and 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 – with a lovely pitch and a lovely stadium that has been built over the years, so I understand what we’re up against.
We’ve come 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 giving the ball away 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 now for a month; Saturday-Tuesday, Saturday-Tuesday for four or five weeks, and it’s really going to stretch the squad. We need to make sure we’re diligent in terms of everything that goes with it. This is a huge game for us and we’ll have to produce our best football to get a result – I’m well aware of that and that’s what we’ll try and endeavour to do.
