Back to winning ways - - The official of Luke Wilkshire

Back to winning ways - 15/03/2004

The gaffer wanted to rest me

The 1-0 victory over Rushden was very welcome and lifts a bit of pressure from the team after a poor run of results. On a personal level I was disappointed to be left on the bench, but I respect Danny Wilson’s decision to rest me. The gaffer did this earlier in the season and to be honest, it probably worked. No one likes missing games and if I’d had the chance to play I would have taken it. To be fair I had felt a little bit lethargic, but in training this morning I did feel that little bit sharper.

We face Oldham at the weekend and although they’re struggling at the wrong end of the table, they’re fighting for survival and we know that we’re not in for an easy game. We drew 1-1 at their place in September and it may be another tight 90 minutes.

Looking at the promotion picture, the one thing that we can say is that our future is in our hands, we have to be happy about that. There’s little point in speculating about other teams – as long as we do the business then the performances of Plymouth, QPR, and Swindon etc. are irrelevant. Saying that, we have some tough games coming up. It’s hard to believe that we play all the present top six sides during April. It depends on your perspective, but I’d prefer to see it as an opportunity to put some distance between us and our challengers for promotion.

Spirit in the camp is good and we firmly believe that we can win automatic promotion. Our football has been good this season, and despite playing quite a few games where we dominated but failed to take full points, we’re still up there. That tells a story, and I firmly believe that we do deserve to finish in one of the top two places. First things first though…Oldham on Saturday.