Head coach Joey Barton spoke to the press on Thursday afternoon ahead of his side’s Sky Bet League One clash against Hull City at Highbury Stadium.
Fleetwood go into the game off the back of a dominant performance over Aston Villa U21 in the EFL Trophy, where forward Harvey Saunders scored his first professional hat-trick in just 15 minutes in the 3-0 win.
Here is what Joey had to say leading up to the game:
On the opposition…
“Hull are a good side who normally play 433. They are one of the sides who set the course at the start of the season to get promoted at the first attempt.
“They are a side that will be there, or thereabouts, come the end of the season. It will be a great opportunity to get a level on where we are at against one of the promotion chasing teams.
“Hull will be looking to take three points, they won’t care that we aren’t at 100% at the moment, it’s just the case of the industry. We are raring to go and we are hoping to upset the form book a little bit by doing what we do at home.”
On the squad…
“Most of the young ones have been playing in the first team and it was nice on Tuesday to see Harvey [Saunders] get his hat-trick to follow on from his first senior goal from the Rochdale game on Saturday. There was a lot of really good performances against Villa that show good signs for the football club going forward.
“Some of the younger lads have put themselves forward for first-team slots after that game. At this moment, we aren’t as strong as we could be but that opens opportunities for those young lads and Tuesday night was a good example of that as they have put themselves in contention for Friday’s game.
“We have a couple of concerns as some of the bodies are creaking and, in this game, they seem to come around in batches. You have times when everyone is fit, you’re winning, and you have selection dilemmas, and you have times when things don’t go your way. We’ve got enough bodies to take care of ourselves and will be looking to give a good account of ourselves live on TV.”