Lordswood boss Matt Barman has hailed the start to the SCEFL season that his young side have made and challenged them to take the next step.
The Medway side are one of the four sides who have been beaten just once in the League thus far – with table toppers Glebe the only unbeaten side – and when you consider that the Lords have one of the youngest squads in the division, their start certainly deserves credit.
Not that the manager is going to let his side rest on their early season laurels as he told KSN this week…
“I’m happy with start we’ve made,” Barman explained, “but we’ve left a few points on the pitch where we’ve got a point where we could have got three, but overall, we’ve got to be happy with the start in the League!”
“We’re in the next stage of the Vase too,” the manager continued following his side’s 4-1 win over Croydon last weekend.
“The result was good, but we were not overly happy with the performance. Saying that, we made four or five changes from our win over Sutton the week before. The result was good and came after we made a couple of changes after we just about needed to when we were 2-1 up.”
“We believe in the group which is important and we’re certainly not going to get above ourselves as it’s such a young group and complacency could be dangerous for us.”
“We’re taking each game as it comes and not getting too far ahead of ourselves – we’ve always said that we’ll get to Christmas then we’ll look at what we should be pushing onto.”
“By then, we would have played everyone and had a look at everyone, we should know where we sit in the overall scheme of things. We are happy enough where we are now – we would like to get a few more points away from home which we can start on Saturday when we go to VCD.”
“I know that there is always a lot of changes at a lot of clubs pre-season – we understand where they have come from and we know that there will be some quality there, but like we try to do every week, we need to make it about ourselves.”
“We’ve a young group of lads who do not really know too many people – on Saturday we had two seventeen-year-old centre halves and made a change with an eighteen-year-old on just to shore things up a bit.”
“They do not know a lot of the reputations and they are playing fearlessly and long may that continue…”
Lordswood start the SCEFL “Ground-hop” on the first weekend in October, when they welcome Corinthian on Friday 6th.
“It’s massive for the Club,” the manager beamed, “We have the Friday night game which for me is the peak of it, and it probably means that I can get out and watch a few other games over the weekend!”
“We are hoping to get a good crowd on the night as sometimes we do suffer when Gillingham and/or Chatham are at home as they are very well supported and fair play to them, but because we are alone playing on the Friday night, it will be another good challenge against another good side in front of a good crowd hopefully.”
“It means that we are playing both the sides relegated to our League back-to-back – we will watch them and know what to expect doing our homework without changing what we are trying to achieve.”
“We’re not at this point planning on wholesale changes because we see that in our opposition – we believe in the system that we are doing and if we go out there and we put it all in and we are not good enough because of our age and the size of the squad and budget then we will go back to the drawing board…”