Manager ahead of the Notts County trip
Manager Greg Abbott spoke to us ahead of the trip to Notts County at the weekend.
“Tuesday night hurt us, there’s no getting away from that,” he said.
“We’d worked very hard on tightening things up and on being much harder to beat here at home, and the level of performance took us by surprise a little bit. There were a lot of very glum faces in the dressing room because we didn’t like that at all.
“The frustration from the fans was understandable because we all felt the same. The home run was something we wanted to protect and we didn’t make life anywhere near hard enough for Walsall to achieve that. We said on Tuesday it wasn’t acceptable because what we don’t want is for performances like that to affect confidence.”
“I know we keep saying this but the response on the training pitch has been good,” he explained. “We needed to see everyone come in and talk about what went on, but then we had to have an immediate response to the work we wanted to do. They’ve been bright and sharp and they now have to take it over the white line on Saturday.”
“Notts County will still have an eye on making the play-off places and they need the results for their own reasons,” he said. “They’ve had a difficult time of late but Chris [Kiwomya] has steadied things down and they’ve become a hard team to beat again.
“He knows the game and he has some good players there. They’ll be looking to build on the last three or four results and push on. It won’t be easy but, like I say, there’s a determination in the group to bounce back from what happened the other night. Hopefully that’s what we’ll do.”
“We’ve almost got a full group to choose from, apart from the obvious concerns we already had, so we have to look at how we think we will get the result we all want,” he said. “It’s down to me to pick the eleven to do that.
“From the work we’ve done on the training pitch it looks like we’ve put Tuesday night behind us now. Our next job is to go out there and prove it.”