Joey, we’re going into the last 10 games of the season. Do you feel as a team you are playing as well as anyone in this division?
I think we’re playing well. The form table will attest to that. We’ve picked points up, but as candidly as I can be with you, we still think we’ve got another two or three gears to go as a group and as a team.
We still feel that we’ve got the best in front of us. At Crawley the other night, lads were arguing in the dressing room over how hard we made the game for ourselves and that wasn’t the senior lads, that came from a couple of the younger players.
They’re asking for the standard to be higher and they’re driving each other on every single week to hit a higher standard which makes my job very easy. We’ve got a great group of seniors in there with some ridiculous levels of experience from world cup qualifiers to Premier League and Championship promotion campaigns and they’ve been superb.
The seniors have really kept some of the younger lads standards high on daily basis with their work in the gym and the recovery and cryotherapy and everything else that we advocate doing to make yourself the best physical specimen that you can.
If the seniors live and breathe that, it makes a hell of a lot easier because the youngsters are always looking up to them and seeing what they do.
We’ve got a great culture at the football club and you can see that in the results profile.
You’re a win off the automatic promotion places now, who are your greatest threats do you think to stopping you achieving what you want to achieve, do you think?
Probably the officials at this level. There’s some good sides in this division. Tranmere beat Mansfield Friday night and you’ve Swindon score late so everybody else is just scrapping. Newport won away at Stevenage and we’ve still got to play lots of the teams in and around us.
There’s going to be a lot of twists and turns, you’ve just got to make sure over the next 30 points available you pick up as many of them as you possibly can. If we go and take 30, everybody knows we’ll be promoted and that’s got to be the aim.
We want to go and win every game because we are capable of winning every single game and that starts on Tuesday night. We have to take them one at a time. It’s a cup final on Tuesday and we’ve got to go and empty the tanks again as we have been in the last two months.
The lads are thriving under the pressure and that type of expectation.
I think for two thirds of this season we’d have said that Forest Green are the stand out team but now it’s starting to look like it could really be three from nine or ten clubs that could get those automatics.
It looked like they were home and hosed and they were all but promoted. They just had to navigate their way there but such is the difficulty of League Two teams are so closely matched that if you lose a bit of confidence or belief all of a sudden people start second guessing themselves.
Forest Green historically have missed out (on promotion). They’ve been a really good club. They’ve had so much success without realising capitalising on that and you would have to think that will be a factor in and around the stadium.
The players are in control of that, but outside factors, as we can attest to from the early part of the season, outside influence can influence matchday performances.
The beauty of our situation is that we started really slowly. We fell out of the gates and we were 91st in the football league. The lads keeping putting a song on, I think it’s by Drake, ‘Started from the Bottom Now We’re Here’. They keep putting that on and it’s true.
We almost hit rock bottom here as a football club in terms of the our league standing so when we get this momentum wave that we’ve got and also because we know what it’s built, we know it’s built on solid foundations of hard graft and turning up for each other every single day.
Confidence is flowing now. Confidence as I’ve spoke about before comes from good preparation. We’re superbly prepared. I could show you some texts from players interacting where they’re like ‘We’ve got the best group. We eat right. We travel right. We train right. We think right’, and our lads are really confident from the skipper down.
I know everybody else gets the plaudits but for me Couttsy as the captain the job he’s done was incredible. In terms of settling the dressing room. You guys won’t get to see that but for me I can’t speak highly enough of the job he’s done for us.
He’s seen the younger players come through and that’s all a testament to the skipper. He’s one in a million.
He’s a player who has done that jump. He went all the way up with Sheffield United and at this stage of the season with 10 games to go, is it mental stuff as well as a bit of luck with injuries and momentum as well and just all those elements coming together.
We’ve just got to win the next game, that’s it. You make your own luck through hard work. That’s my belief. If you work hard you earn your luck. As I say, we’ve got to win the next game.
I’m just laughing now thinking about Nick Anderton, who is 25. They call Couttsy Uncle. They all call him uncle, all the players. So that’s the respect he has within the group. He doesn’t ask anybody to do what he’s not prepared to do for himself.
You should see him with his top off. He’s in prime shape. He’s superbly well-conditioned and that sets the tone. If your captain, who’s in his 30s and has had all the success he’s had and he does that on a daily basis.
We’ve got James Connolly, Luca Hoole, Connor Taylor, Billy Elliot sorry Elliot Anderson. You can see why we call him Billy Elliot though after that on Saturday. Pirouetting through and scoring that goal.
We’ve got a great culture emerging. The lads are turning up for each other every single week and paying their rent on that. As long as they keep doing that for the next period, it’s a great indicator.
We’re red-hot at the minute. We don’t fear anybody. We know every single game we’ve got to work to move through what League Two throws at you, because they’re tough competitive games and you have to work hard to get anything out of those games.
If we’re slightly off as we found out at Newport and Oldham, teams can cause you problems.
Colchester need points, there’s plenty of know how in that team. It’s pretty much an Ipswich old boys team with Skuse, Chambers, Emyr Hughes etc. So a lot of players that know the game and I’m sure will give you a difficult game on Tuesday.
I think they’re on 39 points now which probably gives them enough breathing space. Which could do one of two things: it could relax them and they could play better, or it relaxes them and they don’t play better.
We can’t really focus on Colchester. They’ve got some threats, John Akinde a big unit. Freddie Sears who was at West Ham. Frank Nouble, I don’t know whether he’s fit for it, but he was there last time we played them. Alan Judge, Luke Chambers the centre half and Emyr Hughes who we were offered about 15 times.
They’ve got some good players in there. When I think back to the team who went to Colchester earlier in the season and drew and we had two sending’s off. I think Cian Harries and Trevor Clarke. They had one themselves as well. Brett Pitman scored a really good header.
I think back to that game and it was a bit harem scarem for the first 15 minutes. After the game settled, it was one of the away performances where we started to take a little bit more control, albiet we never capitalised and took maximum points.
We know it will be a tough fixture. If we start with the right intensity and we focus on us, we’ve proven in recent months that we’re more than a match for anyone in the division.
Colchester will be a tough task but we’re really confident going into it. Hopefully a nice big crowd again under the lights at the Mem and we can create a special atmosphere and have a special night.
Sam Nicholson, Jon Nolan, Leon Clarke, Josh Grant, any updates on those guys?
Nicholson has still got some pain rumbling on, we’re just waiting for that to settle. As I say the scans are back but if Stu, the physio, touches it he’s like a jack in the box. So we’ve just got to look after Sammy in that regard because he’s such an important player for us. It’ll maybe another week, I don’t know.
Josh Grant is still not back on the grass. He’s still got a bit of an issue rumbling on with his knee, a bit of a patella issue, hopefully that settles down.
Rodders (Alex Rodman) has had a bit of a setback with his calf. I spoke to Clarkey this morning. He’s feeling a lot better and he’s hoping to join in with the group Monday. So it might come a bit soon it depends on how well he trains, but he’s not a million miles away.
Nolan is the same. He’s just had a little bit of an injection in his knee. He rattled his knee. He over extended it in the Newport game. Everything is fine in there. He just needs a little bit of time for it to settle down. He’s scheduled to definitely miss Tuesday night and maybe the weekend’s game.
You said with Grant that it was his knee tendon?
He had a bit of a problem with his patella from the Sutton game. He’s had plantar fasciitis issues before which has made us managed his load. He’s then had just a little bit of a problem in the bottom of his kneecap. Just a little bit of irritation there.
I think he’s had an injection in it. So he’s on the second phase of the injection work and it settling down. I think he’ll be back on the grass with the physios probably next week. We’re hoping to have him fit and available for the run-in.
That’s the key now getting everybody available to finish the season as strong as we possibly can.
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