Cray Valley (PM) boss Kevin Watson is wary of the “favourites” tag as his side prepare to welcome Canterbury City for Sunday’s BUILDBASE FA Vase Semi Final.
He has praised the work of the “committee” in getting Badgers ready to stage arguably the biggest game in the club’s history as they prepare to celebrate their centenary.
“It’s been a busy week at work and haven’t really thought about it,” laughed the Cray Valley boss who is a school teacher during the week. “Not many of the kids know as I’ve tried to keep it low profile.”
He then reflected on his side’s favourite’s “tag”. He said, “On League form people could say that we’re favourites, but that would be very naive in my opinion, as with Cup competitions you have to respect them or else you could be in trouble. The players are honestly very grounded – we haven’t spoken a lot about it – it’s been easy in the sense that it’s a home game and we don’t have to travel as we did to Devon in the last round, as “normal” home games are fairly normal preparation.”
“We trained as usual with our normal session on Thursday and everything was fine and almost “normal”.
“We played them in December but they’re a completely different outfit now. I’ve seen them a couple of times as they would have seen us, and we know as much about each other as we can for myself and Ben to prepare in that way.”
“The two other opposition we could have faced we’d have known less about – I don’t know whether that’s an advantage or not for me or if it’s an advantage for Ben, but if it’s not, it could be neither an advantage for either of us. I’ll watch a game somewhere on Saturday as I always do when we’re not playing and then Sunday will be here.”
“I’d like to pay tribute to everyone behind the scenes at the club’s who have left me to manage. They’ve got all the bases covered so that I can concentrate on the team. That’s my job to concentrate on the team and they’ve all chipped in with all the other responsibilities that a Semi Final brings – it’s great for me though possibly not for them, as they’re probably panicking now and will all the way through to Sunday!”
“We have no idea how many to expect on Sunday – it may not be as many as Canterbury got in the last round – so we don’t know how much of playing in front of a lot of people will come into it! Look, they’ve got experienced players in their side who will have and so have we, but it’s been under different circumstances…”