Manager’s Notes

THE MANAGER SIMON WEAVER

GOOD EVENING and a huge welcome to the EnviroVent Stadium for the visit of Carlisle United tonight. I hope you had as good a Christmas as was possible in these challenging times. I would like to extend that welcome to Chris Beech, his staff, players and officials who have made the journey over to North Yorkshire this evening. Carlisle are flying high, so will provide another stiff challenge for us, but we will be ready and be aiming to get our home form back on track. I am writing these notes prior to our trip to Oldham on Saturday. After the excellent performance and victory at Exeter, as a group we were desperate to carry the momentum on into the Salford game last saturday and give our supporters an equally good result to savour at home, but it unfortunately just wasn’t to be. Although the performance was good and there wasn’t much between the two sides at all, we were again undone by one solitary lapse in concentration and punished for that. The first goal is so important at this level and falling behind gives you a mountain to climb, so we were disappointed to concede in the manner that we did where we should have dealt with the situation before it ever became a danger. It’s a steep learning curve at this level and we know that small errors are costing us at the moment, but that’s the nature of the beast in League Two, you do get punished for those errors, so we need to do our best to eradicate them. The season is always about the level of performance over 10 months and you finish where you deserve and but for a couple of games where we haven’t reached the levels we’d expect, we have otherwise been in every game and a large majority of our defeats have been by a solitary goal, many of which have been our own undoing. As I’ve said before, it is fine margins and in the position we are, we know we still have a great opportunity in front of us and we must demand the best from ourselves and each other to make the best of it.

As this is our last home game of 2020, I’d like to wish you all a very Happy New Year and although it’s great to see the back of 2020 off the pitch, we cannot forget that on the pitch it has been the most successful year in the club’s history. Let’s hope that in 2021, we can get back to some sort of normality and at some point welcome everyone back to the EnviroVent Stadium in the not too distant future. Simon

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