United boss John Sheridan spoke to us about what he expects to be another tough game at Boundary Park on Saturday afternoon.
“We need to try and get on a little run again,” he said. “We need to go to Oldham feeling confident. It’s a tough place and they’re a good side who want to be involved at the to end come the end of the season.
“We’re aware of that and we know what sort of game we expect from them. We’ve had a good away record, but I’ve said before if you want to go anywhere in this league you’ve got to win your home games.
“If you look back at the last three home games, we’ve lost them all without scoring a goal, but we could have scored five or six goals in the three games quite easily with the chances we’ve had.
“I don’t want to harp on, we haven’t scored in any of them, which is why we’ve lost. In the last four games we’ve probably played the worst against Bury, but we won the game. People don’t look at the things we did wrong in that game because we won.”
“This is a very evenly matched league, but we know we need to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and keep doing the things we do well,” he continued. “On top of that we need to add a ruthless edge to what we’re doing in the final third.
“We’ll do the work on the training pitch and we’ll make sure we’re better at Oldham. If you feel as though you’re playing well enough to win games, which I think we are, you’ve just got to focus on the positives.
“I can talk all day and try and give people the right answers, but we’re not scoring goals. If you don’t score goals you won’t win games, it’s as simple as that. That’s the bit we need to improve on and, when we do, we’ll be a difficult team to deal with.”
“The frustrating thing at the moment is that our away record is probably better than our home record, but that shouldn’t be the case,” he conceded. “If you win the home games you can go into away games looking to nick something, but when you aren’t winning home games you’ve got to go away and try to win, which is always difficult.
“We’ll have a good following down there, even though we’ve lost the last two, which makes it a bit more disappointing. If we were going down there on the back of two positive results we would have had a really good following, but I know the fans will still travel in their numbers.”
And on his return to a club he knows very well, he said: “I’m not really bothered about going back to Oldham. I’ll be going there to get the three points.
“We need to go and win the game to get ourselves back up towards where we want to be. The league is very close, we’ve made life difficult by not getting any points in the two home games, so we have to put that right.”