Ahead of Saturday’s home Emirates FA Cup match versus Nuneaton Town (3:00 KO), manager Tim Flowers has talked about our two wins last weekend and the season so far. He starts with thoughts on the game at hand here…
We take a break from league action this weekend, where we’ve got what I’m sure will prove to be an extremely tough tie against Nuneaton. It’s another local team, who have acquired three of our players from last year, and are on a string of promotions.
If we’re not at our very best, then we could come unstuck, so we’ll need to be prepared for the game – which we have done – by looking at the opposition and going through our normal routine with that.
We didn’t do much in terms of training on Thursday – I’ve got a lot of lads who are carrying knocks and a bit of fatigue from the weekend – the stats that came back on the GPS vests showed me that more than half a dozen of the lads covered over 20k in three days, so we have to be careful that we don’t pick up any more injuries, as we’ve obviously got a fairly lengthy injury list. So we had a conversation and did a bit of recovery really, and tried to keep the lads as fresh as we possibly can for the game. We go into that understanding what we’re up against, ready to try and take the challenge on.
Over last weekend, we have an extensive test, as every team in our league did – Bishop’s Stortford first, where I thought we were absolutely outstanding, with some of the best football that I’ve seen at Step Three for a very long time. We showed, in glimpses, what we could be about as the season progresses, with some lovely approach play, combination play; three goals didn’t really flatter us really – it could have been a lot more. It was a win at home too – and obviously we want to make our home ground a tough place to come to.
We followed that up with a local derby on Monday – which was a totally different type of game. A war of attrition, where it was always going to be a tough game, on a big pitch. I thought we acquitted ourselves well – the only chances Worcester had were from errors from ourselves and probably over complicating it when we didn’t need to. Other than that, we looked solid and steady, and we created a host of chances in the second half.
Nevertheless, we’ve beaten two teams that did the double on us last season – which wasn’t lost on me – and clearly it shows the signs of progress that we’re hoping to see over the next months, until the end of season.
We’ve managed to get five wins out of six and get ourselves into the top part of the table; although it’s in the early days, it’s good to get points on the board because, as I’ve said before, I always want to get to a magic number – where you can say we can forget about any trouble we could be in and look forward to what we could achieve.
A pragmatic view of that is to make sure you’re always looking at what is in front of you and what is behind you, and that’s what I’ll always do. I don’t give a monkeys whether people think we should be doing this or that, the bottom line is – pile as many points on the board as you possibly can.
We take a break from that though this week – I know the club hasn’t had a cup run for a long time, and it’s something that everybody at the club would dearly love; but so would Nuneaton – and they’re definitely going to have something to say about it.
