Jack Connor spoke to Dave Challinor after Tuesday night’s 4-0 win over FC United for his thoughts on a magnificent performance from his side.
The performances so far this season haven’t been up to standard, even by your own admission, but that has to have been rectified tonight you’ve got to say?
Yeah I suppose the score line potentially looks a little bit flattering. The game was a close game until the sending off but credit to our lot they’ve played well, they’ve put in a right good shift, we’ve worked hard and got a deserved result. They’re always good football matches against FC as both teams will try and play and again that was no different.
I thought we started really, really brightly in the first ten minutes. They had a spell where we probably just dropped a little bit, probably just ten yards too deep with the back four. We needed to push against them to stop them getting that space in behind. They had a spare man in midfield but once we stopped that we had a few chances ourselves.
We got away with one right on half time which might have made it a different game had it gone in but the second half, the sending off changed the game, we score from the free kick and it’s sort of plain sailing from there if you like.
Matty Hughes made his first start for Fylde and played the full 90 minutes so you must be delighted with the way he played today?
Yeah, Matty makes a massive difference to us as he gives us a threat going in behind and he’s a very good player, plain and simple, so he’d be a massive addition to any squad certainly in this league and probably above so to have him back is great and it gives us another option.
A couple of the centre backs are out injured at the moment. How far are Dom Collins and Josh Langley from returning?
Josh is probably going to be another month. I think he’s due to go back to the fracture clinic in the next couple of weeks. If he gets a positive result on his x-ray then he can start stepping it up a little bit but in terms of action he’s probably a month away.
For Dom, Saturday may come a little but too soon but he’s certainly not too far and it helps us now with games only being once a week, barring any cup replays, which gives us a little bit of time to get people to recover from little niggles and knocks.
The 4-0 result may have raised a few eyebrows across the league tonight. Do you think teams will sit up and take a lot more notice of us now?
I don’t think take more notice of us because from the start of the season teams know what we’re about. We’ve just got to make sure we keep improving. We can’t afford to stand still from where we were last year and we’ve still not hit the standards we did last year. We knew that it was always going to be tougher because, like I say, people are ultimately going to try and stop us from playing and I was very aware of that. Again, you try and get that across to the players but the start to this season has shown me it’s going to be a lot tougher this year. We’ve obviously been upset with squad selection in terms of injuries, which hasn’t helped, but you’ve got to deal with it. I’d much rather it happen now at the start of the season than around Christmas or later on if you like.
So we’ve just got to keep digging in, keep getting results, and if we can get some bodies back that’ll be great and if we need to go and get some players in then so be it, but we’ll keep picking up results and when we get all our players back fit hopefully you’ll then see the true us.