Assistant head coach Steven Whittaker spoke to the media at Poolfoot Farm ahead of this weekend’s League One clash against Accrington Stanley.
Town are back on the road on Saturday afternoon as they are set to face Lancashire side Accrington at the Wham Stadium in a 3pm kick-off and they will be looking to get back to winning ways after a busy Easter schedule.
The last time the two sides met, it was a brilliant result for the Cods at Highbury as they managed to put three past Stanley back in 2022, with Carlos Mendes Gomes, Shaun Rooney, and Josh Earl all scoring on the day.
Here’s what Whitts had to say in his pre-match interview:
On what to expect from Accrington...
“We need to get into the mentality that they are going to be fighting as each team we are going to come up against have something to fight for, so we need to go out there and match their willingness and energy to go and get points from the games. If we don’t do that, we are going to find ourselves in a hard situation.
“If we match them, we know we’ve got the quality to go and win games, that’s the message to the players and it’s then down to them on the field to produce that. Every game is important, no one should let a game pass them by, they should want to put themselves in a good light at every opportunity they get so it would be good to see out the season on a positive note.
“The game at our place against Accrington earlier on in the season was an important one for us; it was one of those games where we managed to score a couple of goals and kept a clean sheet at the same time. After speaking to them after that game, they won’t see that as a true reflection of themselves and will show a lot of fight this time around.”
On bouncing back from recent results…
“It will be a similar squad to the last game and apart from a few slight injuries on the grass, which we will assess, the squad is looking healthy. The last two games have led to disappointing results, but the performance on Monday was a little bit better than Friday, even though we still lost some poor goals – there wasn’t much in the game.
“The Cambridge performance was poor, it was one of our worse performances this season, so it’s important that we look to bounce back from these results at the weekend. It’s another team who are fighting for their lives near the bottom of the table, so we are expecting a hectic fast paced game that we need to be ready for.
“We’ve got to a point tally where you can say to yourselves that you’re safe, but we don’t want to rest on that as those kinds of performances have happened over the last couple of games. We want to push forwards and earn as many points as we can in the remaining games so we can finish on a higher and head into summer on a positive curve.”