Joey, with players coming back and having more selection decisions, in second half of last season I think you knew what your best team was and you’d tinker a little bit and change for certain matches, but how key is it trying to do something similar now and pin down your best 11-13 players?
Yeah, I think you’re always striving to get that. In reality, teams that I’ve been part of when I’ve been successful, it’s a marathon, it’s a long, hard slog, and I think last year we were a powerhouse in the division with the level of personnel we recruited over the two windows. I felt we had a really strong group for the level.
This year, we’ve gone up a level, so there are different challenges out there. I always want my teams to be tactically fluid so they don’t have to play one shape. I think it’s very important in the modern game, and maybe that’s just me being a modern coach, but I want to coach my players to be tactically fluid so we can change shape because that’s how I played the game.
You might have to play 4-5-1 for certain games and during the game after 20 minutes you have to alter the shape slightly. I think the higher and higher you go up the pyramid, the more fluid you have to be as a player.
If we’re in the market to develop players and want the best players at our club and we’ve got a lot of younger players here, then part of the curriculum here is teaching them to be fluid. Sometimes that’s forced on you via injuries or suspensions, and other times you will adjust for the level of the opponent.
It would be stupid for us to go to Sheffield Wednesday away or whatever and expect to play exactly how we want to play. I think when you become the dominant team in the division with the resources and the best players, then you roll out the ‘This is what we play, you have got to beat us’. At times last year, we got to that stage where we were the dominant side, certainly in the latter part where the opponent has adjusted for you to try and stop us.
To start this year off, we obviously needed to get results so we’ve had to tweak it a little bit because of personnel available, but also the challenge has gone up. We’re in a big division now and there are teams that will regularly pull 20,000-30,000 crowds.
The stakes have got higher and we have to be tactically fluid. The last couple of weeks are a testament to that, a back three at Exeter, we changed a couple of times in the Cambridge game to get the job done, and again the other night. We started with one shape and finished with another to get a valuable three points on the board.
Once we sit top of the table and we’re beating everybody, I imagine we will be going ‘We ain’t changing for everybody, you come and beat us’. Until we earn the respect of everybody, we’re going to be adjusting to give ourselves the best chance of winning every game.
Saturday’s game has similar themes to the past couple of games, but also it will have different adjustments, and on the other side of that you’ve got to manage the load of the squad to make sure you’ve got lots of players available for lots of minutes because we want high-energy performance and to do that sometimes, as we did the other night, you’ve got to rest a couple of players and use them as finishers as opposed to starters.
The modern game now, I think we’re all aware and you’re hearing Eddie Jones and the boys talking in the rugby now about starters and finishers. I said before the season started about the five-sub rule and for me, it allows us to be tactically fluid and do it that way.
I want to pick 11 players, but you have to earn the right to do that and usually if you’re doing that in March, April or May, you’re on a good seam and having a good season.
Interesting about the finishers there because knowing what sportspeople, if you’re told you’re not starting and you think you played pretty well in the last game, even if it’s for resting or a tactical decision, I imagine those conversations don’t get any easier?
No, but I think the lads know and I always speak to them and explain the reasoning behind it. I think it’s very important that they know.
They know it’s a squad effort here and sometimes you’ve got to put your personal disappointment (aside) because I get every player wants to play every game, but if we’ve got 23 or 24 good players here, there are going to be 12 of them upset when you name a starting XI because unfortunately, you can only give 11 starting jerseys out.
For us to get to where we need to get to, you’ve got to expect that there are going to be times when you’re going to play a lot of games, and then there might be times when there are tactical adjustments for certain games.
The key to that is being a player that you can’t drop, that you can’t afford to leave out. I think that’s what happened last year, you got to a point where the people in the jersey were difficult to leave out. They didn’t need a rest because they were fully fit and functioning.
When I first got here, the biggest problem I had was players weren’t fit for 90-minute performances. Now it’s about maintaining a level of physicality. 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.
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. 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.
At 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. It’s like a boxer only being fit for nine rounds. It’s a problem if you don’t get them beat in nine rounds, you’ve got three more rounds.
Physical fitness now at the top level is what dictates the game. You have to be fit and for our lads, we maintain fitness by utilisation of the squad. I think it will get us where we want to go, which is into a really positive position in the table.
I’m looking now and we’re five points outside the play-offs, a week can change football. We don’t play Real Madrid or Man United. 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 was going to ask about the clean sheet because we know the issues you’ve had defensively with people to choose from, but how key is that in giving the whole team confidence that you’ve got a solid platform to build from?
The key is we’ve got two players for each position across the backline. 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.
You want to pick a consistent six or seven, I think. 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.
But I think having 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. 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.
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 a young team evolving, I think we will grow in confidence from that.
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 the notes I gave the lads before the game on Instagram this week. 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.
We would have wanted to create more opportunities, but it was about starving the opposition and demoralising them. 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.
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.
Saturday, another team you won’t be expecting to trouble the top end of the table in Cheltenham, but they have established themselves at this level with a pretty good base for a small club.
Yeah, the kind of route map for sides like us that have come out of League Two. You don’t want to have the success and the upscale of a promotion and then go back down again the next year. That undoes all the hard work.
Yeah, you want to kick on and we’ve got bigger ambitions than just staying in the division, but you can’t run before you can walk and you have to solidify our group. If that’s staying in the division by the skin of your teeth, then so be it.
I think with Cheltenham and Cambridge before that, they have shown if you are a good solid outfit and you’ve got good basics and principles, then you can establish yourself in this division. Saturday is a good benchmark of what type of team we are.
We’re still trying to figure out where we sit in the division. Cambridge are a good side and we think we are better than them. Lincoln beat us 6-3 and we think we’re better. We still trying to figure out and by the time we’ve played everybody once, I think we’ll know where we are.
For us, it’s a big game because if we take four or six points off Cheltenham over the course of the season, that gives us a right chance of finishing above them in the table. If you finish above Cheltenham and Cambridge in the table, I think you’ll be a League One side next year and that is the aim for us.
Obviously, if we do more than that and we get a couple of wins, seven points out of nine, all of a sudden you start looking at Bolton in the last play-off place. You just never know on our game if you get on a run early, be hard to beat early.
We’re going to have to be as good as we can be on Saturday because it will be tough with a bit of a local taste to it. I think our fans will travel in numbers and hopefully, we get another cracking game and another three points.
Joey, you are 13 games into the season and you’ve played a decent cross-section of the teams you are going to play. What are your impressions of the league so far in terms of the standard and style you have come across? Has it surprised you at all or is it as you expected?
You realise the step up in calibre of opposition. When you play Ipswich, it’s self-evident. They spend £1million on full-backs and you can see they are a good side, probably the best side we’ve played. We’ve still got a few sides to play who sit in that top bracket, but Ipswich for me have been the best we’ve played so far, as you would expect. They are paying players £10,000 a week and a £1million for players.
Man City are brilliant, but it does also help that Pep (Guardiola) has spent the money he has spent. The best footballers always cost you money.
For us, there is no fear attached to anyone. We feel we are as good as 18 or 19 teams in the division and it will be up to us to establish where we are. Yeah, there are probably some bigger resource pools out there, but we feel we can close the gap on them with teamship and the stuff that doesn’t require talent to do.
You look at the division and you don’t play a Man City and you don’t think they are light-years ahead. The closest we’ve got is probably Ipswich. We’ve had a taste of Portsmouth, those kind of sides who are expecting to be promotion-chasing and we’re not a million miles away from them.
We’ve got bits to do and bits to learn but in the next few years I would imagine we would close the gap on all of them and that’s the reason we’ve taken younger players. They have to take older players because they need to get promoted. We want to take younger players because we want to grow them and grow ourselves a promotion-chasing group.
It’s a bit of a medium-term strategy, but give me an £8-9million budget, and Ipswich might be more than that, and it’s a quicker way to fix it because you can pay £1million for Leif Davis. We don’t have that.
I think Wael is a wealthy individual but we’re going to have to do that a different way here and that way is investing in younger players, developing younger players and building the football club in a sustainable manner to get it where it wants to go to, which is the Championship, and when you get there, can you get to the next step, that’s the challenge.
I think the step from League One to the Championship is doable. It feels a lot more doable this week because we’ve got seven points out of nine, but the key for us to sustain the success of last year’s promotion. It would be stupid to try to run before we can walk.
The long-term goal here is to have a great period at the football club and a period that the fans will remember for a long period of time. We’ve made a great start with that with the memories we made last year, and I thought Tuesday night, to see the players and fans in unison like that, I thought it was an incredible turnout for a League One side.
We’ve got to keep feeding that fanbase because they are clearly desperate for success and they are desperate for a good team they can follow the length and breadth of the country.
For us, League One is a fantastic league with some great clubs in and we’re going to have big crowds come to the Mem and also our fans are going to go and be part of 30,000, 27,000, 28,000 in away trips to good stadiums.
I thought Tuesday night was a cracking stadium. It’s a pity they can’t fill it, it would be better for us, that. We’d get a lot closer to capacity than they would, but all of that comes with incrementally building and getting better.
I don’t think Wael will be too pleased with me talking about the stadium. I think he gets enough heat about that, but that’s the plan. The intention is always to leave here a lot better than what we found it, and I said to you when we were struggling and if we lose another seven, we’re not stupid, you know it’s a results industry, but you also know you can walk away with your head held high because the operating standard right across the football club is markedly different than when we found it.
We’ve just got to keep driving that standard all the time and who knows where it can take us?
How big a challenge is it to transition from a game like Tuesday with it being so empty and it feels like a home game to a more humble stadium against a team that is definitely going to be more up and at you than MK were? It’s a tight pitch with terraces and it’s going to be a different atmosphere and a very different pattern to the game. Is it difficult to switch between the two?
It’s the beauty of League One, isn’t it? You’ve got Pride Park, Hillsborough and Fratton Park and Bolton. You’ve got some really nice stadiums and then some nuts and bolts places you’ve got to go to.
Our place will be tricky for some people to come to, it’s a bit of an eclectic bunch of stands, but it works and it can be an intimidating atmosphere. For us, going to Cheltenham with a tighter pitch, the fans right upon you with that local feel, you have to adjust.
I think Exeter is a similar feel, so it makes us feel like our fanbase is massive when we play at those places. Even the other night, it looked like we had more fans in because they were all in one area, even though they probably had more fans and they were spaced out. It felt to us like we had more fans in the stadium and they were louder because they were all together and their fans were spaced out and couldn’t really generate an atmosphere.
I don’t think that will be the case at Cheltenham, so it will be good. I think it makes the atmosphere better in the stadium. I prefer it, I would prefer to play in a small stadium that was full to the rafters than a big lovely stadium like MK’s but it was empty. It was almost like we were back in the COVID days a little bit, apart from our fans.
You have to adjust and we will be ready for a feisty game because Cheltenham will be keen to protect their stadium and get their season going. For us, we want to beat them and we’ve got to be ready to do what’s necessary.
I think Wade Elliott’s time at Burnley was before yours, but what are your impressions of the job he’s doing at Cheltenham taking over from Michael Duff?
They usually stick together, coaching groups, so I didn’t know what had gone on there, whether he’s settled in the area with kids or whatever, but I was expecting him to go with Duffo up to Barnsley.
He’s stayed and he’s taken over there and it’s tough to follow, especially when you’ve been a coach, the old manager and, obviously, they’ve had real success with Michael there. You kind of got to change because you don’t want to do what the old manager has done, but also when it’s been successful it would have been a really tricky job for Wade.
I think he’s made a good fist of it. I think they started a bit sluggish but they seem to have got in a groove now. I’ll know a bit more after the game on Saturday, I’ve never coached against him before. When you have coached against them before, you can work out what they are going to do or what some of their moves are. It’s the first time I’ve coached against one of Wade’s side so I’ll know a lot more about his style after we’ve traded on Saturday.
From the tape, what do you see? I think Alfie May is out injured at the moment.
That’s a plus because he’s a goalscorer.
They’ve got Dan Nlundulu from Southampton up front, Ryan Broom and Liam Sercombe probably playing off him. Is that what you see?
Yeah, and you’ve got Ryan Jackson who was at Gillingham and Willy Ferry out the other side. It will be a 5-3-2, very similar to what MK tried to do against, albeit with a different feel. I don’t think they will be building up as much at the back as MK and the goalkeeper won’t be starting a lot of the attacks like the MK keeper does.
But with Sercombe in there, he’s obviously got a good rapport with the club. He’s predominantly someone who has been industrious and will go and get the ball back for you.
Broom, last time I saw him at Cheltenham was when they played Accrington in the FA Cup years ago. Michael was the manager and Broom was playing right wing-back and he nicked a decent move to Peterborough playing that position. At Plymouth and at Cheltenham, he’s been used in more of an attacking midfielder. He was a player we considered in the summer when we knew he was coming out of Peterborough.
For us, if May doesn’t start, he’s a real threat in your box and he always looks like he’s got a goal in him, so that will be a big loss for them, but again, one man’s disappointment can be another man’s opportunity and we mustn’t lose sight of how hard you’ve got to work for a point in this league.
We need to be as good as we can be to deal with Cheltenham’s threats and set-play threat because they are a very competent, but we are very confident if we get ourselves right, we are more than a match for anyone in this division.
On the injury front, is there an update on Josh Grant? You said surgery was on the table for him.
Josh has had surgery this morning so that probably puts paid to his season. That’s a tricky one, he’s got to get through one surgery and then he might need a little bit more surgery and we’re hoping that will get to the bottom of it.
Josh is a player we’re keen to keep, so we’ll have a chat with him and his representatives. Hopefully, we’re going to fix him and this is the end of his setbacks and we think there is still enough juice in the player.
He’s a really good player and I think he’s still got his best years out in front of him, so from our perspective it rights him off this season, but we’re hoping to get him back in pre-season and it will be like signing a new player. Josh is a top kid and we’re going to support him in this period.
Josh is out of contract at the end of the season, so you’re saying the club is going to look to do right by him?
We haven’t had a chat with his agent or representative yet, but I think that conversation is coming. We’ve had some chats at power level at our club, the owner is aware of it, Tom Gorringe is aware of it, Eddy Jennings is aware of it.
We don’t leave anyone behind and this could be the root of Josh’s setbacks. It’s sad it’s taken until he’s 23 to find it, but he could be 33.
I do believe if we get him through this, we’ve got a really good player. I think he’s a really good player and he’s got a right chance. He’s only just had surgery this morning and there is a long way to go, but we want to support Josh.
You bring up his football brain a lot and you see him as a coach in the future. Is this an opportunity in a few months’ time maybe when he’s back up on his feet that you could get him in and around it on the grass and learning that side of it, otherwise I guess it’s wasted time?
Yeah, I think he’s an inquisitive mind and he’s got a really good chain of thought and a really good opinion on the game. I think he will organically move into that space anyway.
Hopefully, that’s having fulfilled a long career. It’s been a tricky start to his career not having enough minutes and game time.
If your kneecap is disintegrating because of a biomechanical issue, just the way you’re born, then that isn’t going to give you longevity in the game, but we feel that this operation takes that away and should allow Josh to fulfil his potential.
If Josh would have been injury-free, you probably wouldn’t have gotten to him. He’d have been good enough to get in and around Chelsea’s first team, and if not then certainly he wouldn’t miss that by far, which puts you at a very good stage.
The reason he is here is he has had a lot of setbacks and hopefully this can turn the corner for him.
He’s lucky that he’s got a good head on his shoulders and if his body fails him, he can flip his brain over to coaching very quickly.
A fully fit Josh Grant is a big miss for you, isn’t he, because he can play anywhere in defence or midfield?
A fully fit Josh Grant starts. I don’t know what position he starts in, but he starts because he is such an intelligent player. We’re talking about building a tactically fluid team and Josh coaches on the pitch when he’s out there. If you watch games back, you can see him do it and he just understands what we’re looking for.
When you’ve got a player like that out there, it’s more than a player. It’s more confidence and information that goes on out there because instead of us screaming on the touchline, you’ve got a player there saying you need to do this or that.
For us, that is the frustration because I think everyone is aware of how talented Josh is, none more so than Josh himself, and it must be soul-destroying to have setbacks and be in the gyms. Honestly, it’s the worst place to be as a player.
It’s way harder being injured as a player than when you’re fit. When you’re fit, the game of football is easy. When you’re injured, you’re on that assault bike and lifting weights on your own and you’re hanging around with the physios.
It’s soul-destroying and all you want to do is be back out on the grass and having a game of footy with your mates. Josh has had a long spell, so it’s just fingers crossed that this is the issue resolved. He’s had surgery and in a couple of weeks or months, he’s going to require further surgery on the other knee.
James Connolly, could he play against Swindon?
He’s back on the grass and back with the group. He’s wanting minutes in the Swindon game but we’ve got to keep moving him through the gears of training.
I think, if he gets through everything, there should be minutes for him in that Swindon game and then that brings him back into the fold.
And has Alfie Kilgour cleared concussion protocol?
Alfie is back now, yeah.
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