Manager Keith Curle gave us his reaction to the Saturday home victory over Grimsby Town shortly after full time, speaking first about the mammoth effort over the course of Friday and Saturday to get the game on.
“Today was about a football club pulling together and the supporters can be very proud of their efforts,” he said. “The decision-making process from our ground staff, led by Dave Mitchell, was excellent as they got their judgement right in the days leading up to the weekend with the bad weather coming in.
“He did what he knows to be right with his pitch, and it worked. It’s probably one of the first times a referee has deemed the pitch playable without having to have a look at all of it. He saw patches of it underneath the snow and the covers and he knew it was fine, and that’s because the football community know what we’re about.
“The people who came in yesterday [Friday] and today to clear the snow have been excellent. It’s great to see, even to the extent that we had Kris Twardek’s mum and dad helping, and they’d come all the way over from Canada.
“When you’ve got a player and his parents involved you know you’ve got people buying in to what you’re trying to achieve. The result meant a lot to the players because there was a lot of speculation that the game was going to be off.
“I spoke to them on Friday and I told them that wasn’t the case. I knew that Dave Mitchell was more than confident that the game was going ahead. That reverberated around the changing room and you could see the focus kick in.”
“We also got information that Grimsby were of the mindset that they thought the game was going to be off,” he added. “The pitch was lively, because it had been under snow for four or five days, but the performance merited the result and, in turn, that merited the hard work that had been put in by the community.
“The pleasing thing is that the effort brought everybody together and there’s been no talk of contracts, players not starting, should the manager be sacked, who is the manager going to be ... it became a football club focused on what was happening on the pitch.
“When the players see their fans rallying round like this it does act as a motivation. They wanted to keep the run going for themselves and for the club, and they wanted to get a result as another way of saying thank you for what had happened to make the game possible.”
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