Danny Livesey on setting standards
Defender Danny Livesey spoke to us about focusing on the job at hand as the kick off to the new season rapidly approaches.
“Pre-season has been good, but it’s also been hard,” he said. “It’s done now and I can’t wait for Saturday. It’s what we all gear up towards and we know that we need to be better than last year. That’s the one aim that every single one of us has as we go into this season.
“The games we’ve played are all about building up match fitness and I said last week that you never really know where you’re at through those first few weeks. It takes a while to get going and there was possibly a bit of a hangover from last season in there as well.
“It’s up to us to change everyone’s opinion and I thought we started to do that against Bolton. We were a lot more solid and we need to go into every game with that mindset. If we concede goals then we know people are going to be on us, so we have to make sure we’re working hard right across the team.”
“I think the Burnley game helped to remind us about some of the problems we had last season,” he admitted. “You have to keep it in context – it was a pre-season friendly – but ultimately it’s made the training sessions even more intense than they were. It showed us again that we can’t afford to step off at all. Before we knew it we were out of the game and we can’t afford to do that again this year.
“The good thing out of that game was as soon as it was finished we all wanted to play Bolton. There’s no point in dwelling on anything and it was nice that all of the hard work paid off for us.”
“The partnership with Mike [Edwards] has been developing nicely,” he told us. “We’ve addressed quite a lot of things between us this pre-season and hopefully we can go on to build something which is much more stable. We both take full responsibility for the goals we conceded and we know we weren’t good enough down the middle at all.
“That’s something which really upset us because we know we have got to be better as a partnership. It’s almost a new back four with Brad [Potts] and Reece [James] in there as well and the simple fact is that we have to gel quickly. We don’t have time for anything else.
“If we don’t start things off properly then it’s going to be another long season for the whole team. We need to hit the ground running and make sure we’re doing our jobs so that we can give the lads up front every opportunity to go on and win the game.”
“I think I’ve been ok through pre-season on a personal level,” he added. “If I can bring the form I had from Christmas onwards into the new season then I’ll be happy. I let myself down last season because I lost the communication side of my game for some strange reason.
“It’s something I need to bring back because it’s going to be down to the more experienced lads to keep the momentum going through the busy run of games we have.”
“I think the mindset definitely changes as we go through this week,” he confirmed. “Obviously the training sessions are now all geared towards Leyton Orient and there will be more nerves and excitement as the days go by.
“I’ve said it earlier, but our target has to be to make sure we improve. What we did last season wasn’t good enough and you could even argue that we were in some serious trouble at one point. We don’t want that again.
“I think as long as we are better in every area of the pitch then we’ll just have to wait and see where that takes us. Hopefully it’ll be a good season for everyone.”
United Player subscribers can see a video interview with Danny Livesey now. Click HERE to go to the Player platform. Follow the same link for more information on United Player, and to subscribe.
Click HERE to see an extract from this interview on our Official YouTube channel.