Hythe Town finally get 2019 going this weekend after a two week enforced break from BOSTIK South Eastern action.
“It’s been frustrating that we haven’t played yet in 2019 especially as we halted the run of four defeats in a row last time out against Whitstable – it was a good 2-0 win and now we’re looking to take that into the New Year to kick start 2019 starting tomorrow.”
“It’s been really frustrating not playing especially the way December went. I said in my programme notes for tomorrow the 2018 was a great year for us and we have to look back on the year as a whole and accept that we had a really poor December which was frustrating for all of us. After hopefully putting things right with the win at Whitstable, its just been so frustrating that we haven’t played but at the same time, we’ve taken the opportunity to train really well, bought a couple of players in – we signed Ollie Rowe from Ashford who is someone I’ve been trying to sign for quite a while – its given us the opportunity to regroup and as I said, have some good sessions and get ourselves back on a winning run.”
“What we achieved last year was a hell of an achievement and if we had crept in at the death it would have been wonderful and we have to move on, which I think we have done as we’ve spent most of the season in the Play Off places apart from December’s poor run. But that happens to all teams and is football! Teams lose games – teams have bad runs – teams bounce back as we’ve done against Whitstable and now, we have to go on another run ourselves. If we want to get and involved at the end of the season, we need to be putting four or five wins together now – theres a lot of points still to play for this season and a lot of games to play; we’ll keep working hard and if we can put something together, I’m sure we’ll be there or there abouts.”
Saturday sees in form Hayward Heath Town arriving at Reachfields to face what sort of Hythe squad we wondered? The manager replied, “We released Nathan Daley which was a hard call and not something that I wanted to do – we’ve brought Ollie in and to balance to books, I’ve had to make a hard call and Nathan Daley has now gone after what was probably the hardest call I’ve ever had to do in management because he’s a good player and a top bloke and so it wasn’t a decision I made lightly, but as I said that sadly, is the harsh reality of being a manager these days. Everyone else is fit and available which leaves me with some tough decisions to make before kick-off.”