Joey Barton has challenged his side to turn good performances into points, ahead of Tuesday night’s Sky Bet League One fixture against Wycombe Wanderers.
Barton’s side lost 3-1 to Barnsley on Saturday despite dominating for large periods of the game, with the visitors scoring a late goal to add unfair gloss to the scoreline.
With Wycombe coming to Highbury on Tuesday, the turnaround is quick, something Town’s head coach is happy about.
“The beauty of this league is that you can move onto the next game straight away,” said Barton.
“The fans will have gone home disappointed from losing the game on Saturday, but they’ll know the team were fully committed to the cause and tried to win the game of football.
“If they keep turning up and sticking with us, we’ll win more games than we’ll lose. The disappointing thing for us was not turning a good performance in large parts into points.
“We need to start turning Highbury into a really difficult place to come, it’s something we need to do if we’re going be successful. The lads have got to start turning good performances into points.”
Injuries and suspensions have affected the Cod Army squad, however both Ashley Hunter and James Wallace will be available on Tuesday night after serving their suspension on Saturday.
“It will be good to have them back. We want to get a settled side and get the team into a groove, however sometimes football doesn’t allow you to do that.
“We’ve had a couple of niggles – [leaving players out] is precautionary as a couple of days injury could be a couple of weeks if it was risked. You’ve got to be careful with the health of the squad, but saying that we’ve got a nice size to the squad with real competition for places.
“This league is very competitive so without a shadow of a doubt it’ll be a tough game. Gareth Ainsworth’s side are used to winning from last season – as we’ve seen already with Accrington – and they’ll be up for the battle. They lost at home to Southend but managed to get back from 3-0 to 3-2, so they finished that game in the ascendency, but we did too.”