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Barton previews match with Gillingham

1 March 2019

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After picking up all three points against Burton last time out, Joey Barton is looking for his side to go out and perform against Steve Lovell's Gillingham when they meet on Saturday.

The Fleetwood Town boss spoke to the media on Friday morning at Poolfoot Farm, and disucssed his side's play-off hopes, how his team can stop Gillingham and all importantly, ways in which they can pick up all the points on home turf.

Barton - whose side are six points off the play-offs - could narrow the gap if results go their way come 5pm on Saturday, but he knows there's plenty of work to do with many games to play.

Here are quotes from Joey Barton's pre-Gillingham press conference.

On his side's play-off hopes…

“We spoke about raising the levels of consistency up over the course of the season and certainly since we went out of the FA Cup, the players as a group have found that and definitely become more consistent in performance which has led to better results and a stronger league position.

“It was an ambition of ours (making the play-offs) coming into the football club, at periods in the season it looked like we were not going to be ready to do that and it does fluctuate on a three or four game basis.

“There’s still plenty of points to fight for and we’ve got to play some of the teams in and around us, so it’s always good when you have your destiny in your own hands. For us we are just going to take it one game at a time and we can’t get too distracted by that as it’s a very tight division where everybody can beat everybody.”

On Saturday’s game against Gillingham…

“We’ve got to focus on winning our next game which is Gillingham on Saturday, a side with slightly different aims to us this season but also very important aims for them which is their survival in this division for next season.

“We lost down their 3-0, albeit I felt we played a certain way and we are looking forwards to the challenge and putting right our biggest defeat of the season.

“I’m really, really looking forwards to the game tomorrow. We know it will be a tough game because they are down there fighting for their lives at the bottom but also we feel we have got a little bit of a wrong to right, we are looking forward to exercising that kind of demon.”

On the squad’s fitness…

“Same bodies, everybody from the weekend at Burton should be fit. Only concern we have is Ashley Nadesan, who came off with a tight hamstring, but we think we got to it beforehand. He is back training today, so we are expecting him to be fine unless something happens in training today.

“Everybody who is injured is injured and everybody who is fit is fit. We will deal with what we have got, and we have a strong squad for tomorrow.”


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