United boss Eric Kinder gave us his reaction to the 1-0 victory over Accrington last Saturday, with the lads having battled hard to eventually earn their win.
“We started really well, that’s the best we’ve started a game so far this season,” he said. “We just needed a goal to settle us down and obviously the longer it goes on without scoring the more frustrated you get.
“That’s the same for the players because they see the chances they’ve missed and it makes them start to try to force things along a bit.
“With the way the game went we could see that the only way Accrington were going to score was from a mistake made by us, and I started to get this gut feeling that they were going to break away and nick it.
“That’s why it was really pleasing that we got the goal in the last ten minutes because the lads did deserve their win having dominated the vast majority of the game.”
And on the clean sheet, he said: “We don’t get many of them and that’s something we talk about every week.
“We know we need more clean sheets because I fancy us to score in every game. If we can start to keep the other side out regularly then things will look very different for us.
“The good thing about Saturday was that the lads kept going. You can start to panic when you realise time is running out, but in football 10 or 15 minutes is still a long time.
“You don’t have to start going direct and lumping it forward, you can still build up properly and do the right things. You’ll still create enough chances to win it if you stay composed and remain patient.
“To be fair to the lads they did that, and they deserved the winning outcome because they put a lot of effort into getting there.”
“People use the word confidence a lot, don’t they, and it can become an excuse sometimes,” he told us. “If you say you’ve lost confidence it can be a bit of a way out, and we’ve all felt like that whatever age we are and whatever job we do.
“It’s the same at the side of the pitch as well. We were watching the game and we were getting frustrated, but they kept playing and they got their reward for doing that.
“We play Morecambe in the cup this weekend, as part of a three-team group [Carlisle, Bradford and Morecambe] so if we can get a win in the first game it’ll be a straight shoot-out between us and Bradford for who goes through to the quarter-final.
“We let ourselves down in this competition last year so we want to get through, but vital to that will be winning the first game, because with the format as it is you tend to find that if you lose the first one you won’t got through.”
United – Robinson, Steele (Ellis 61), Kilsby, Walton, Barnett, Day, Bell, Leslie (c), Fishburn, Swailes, Garvey (Taylor 77). Subs – Breeze, Simons, Watt.
Goal – Swailes (86)