Howarth – Ugly But Important Win

Assistant manager Neil Howarth hasn’t bothered to try and paint the game against Torquay United as being particularly pretty on the eye, but with them fighting for their lives down at the bottom of the league he knew how important a win it was for us by the end of the game.

Speaking to the Official Site following full time, our assistant also commented that it was clearly not one of our better performances but the secret was in just trying to be positive following half time.

‘We just tried being positive to be honest. Although we weren’t playing well, they weren’t doing that deliberately so we though we would be positive with them and to try and get them to work hard and increase the tempo.’

Haworth goes on to say that in many respects it looked like we were playing with a degree of fear, and in the first half especially both teams’ systems were effectively cancelling each other out which didn’t make it a great game to watch, but what is important in games like that is that you tweak the subtle things and hope the confidence grows enough for you to come out with a well earned result at the end of it, and he feels we did that with the winner from Richards 15 minutes from time.

‘It wasn’t great to watch, but you get games like that and it’s important to pick up points when you haven’t played well. Ten out of ten for character and effort in the second half but obviously we would like to be playing better.’

The assistant gaffer however did say that despite not playing particularly well we could’ve found ourselves two nil up and really we should’ve to have closed the game out more, but again that’s something that the players will keep working hard on so we can achieve it and make life easier for us in the final ten minutes of games as we’d all like to be a bit more comfortable, so he’s just pleased we got their in the end, held out for the win and kept a clean sheet in the process again.

We are now four unbeaten again with two draws and two wins and it’s just a shame the scoreline of the Chesterfield loss got in the way otherwise things would look a bit prettier, but as manager Mark Yates has said previously a play off hope is probably too much of a long shot now but we could certainly creep up the table a bit more if we can sustain this run.

‘It has been a difficult season and it’s obviously now what we were aiming for at the start, but we aren’t even looking at the play offs. We are looking forward to Tuesday and hopefully another three points. If we can keep doing that then we might see where we are with six or seven to go.’