Shrewsbury Town are our visitors on Saturday and relatively new gaffer Matt Taylor brings with him a team that is comfortably entrenched in mid-table at this early stage.
“Matt’s a good manager, he’ll be looking for them to kick on,” Carlisle boss Paul Simpson said. “He’s got quite a simple style about the way he gets them playing, there’s nothing fancy about them, but they’re really effective.
“It’s the next game for us and we’ve got to try and rise to the challenge. I think their approach is quite similar to Port Vale, they don’t take many risks, they’re a side with high energy and they want to press high and win the ball back as early as they can.
“They’ve got players who are a real threat, so it will be a tough test for us. I’ve said this five times already this season, they’re all going to be tough. Let’s get our sleeves rolled up, let’s hope we can enjoy the day and do everything we can to get a result.”
“They’ve got a good squad,” he continued. “They’re a football club that have cemented a place in League One, so it’s going to be another tough challenge for us. But it’s a great game to look forward to.
“There’s an opportunity for us here, if we go about our jobs properly and consistently over the 90-105 minutes, whatever we have to play, if we can get a better level of consistency than we’ve had so far, I think we’ve got more than enough to get a result.
“And one goal, a win, I don’t care how we do it, it lifts everybody. If it’s luck or through good play, good fortune, who cares.
“We’ve just got to get something that gives us a lift, gives everybody that belief, gets the ball rolling for us, gets the monkey off our back in terms of ‘you haven’t won a game’ and people can stop bleating about that.
“We’ve just got to do everything we can that gets the performance, gets us some luck, gets us a result at the end.”
And he repeated the message that it’s through the tough times that it’s important to stay calm and stick together.
“That’s what we need to do,” he agreed. “We’ve got 41 games left and we’ve got a lot of football that still has to be played.
“We know there have been times in all of the games where we’ve let ourselves down, and there have been individual mistakes, and we haven’t been finishing things off when we’ve created opportunities.
“We can’t let that get to us because the next game is now the most important one and it’s the one that we can do something about. Let’s get our heads cleared, our minds on what we need to do and let’s look forward to a brilliant day.
“The fans have been brilliant in that respect for us so far. I don’t do social media but people tell me about it, and I know there’s rumblings going on.
“There’s a little bit of discontent, perhaps disillusionment and all of this sort of stuff, but we’ve worked really hard to get here. Let’s stick together, stay with it, and let’s hope the players have got something in them to go out and get a performance that gets that result we all want.”
As for the familiar faces we’ll be seeing, he told us: “I’ll be perfectly honest with you I don’t really care about Morgan Feeney at the moment. He isn’t our problem.
"We’ve got to make sure that we get our performance right and I hope at the end of the game we’ve got a result and the fans can applaud him then.
“I don’t want anybody getting a good welcome, I want our fans to come in and, as I said earlier, it’s easy to stick together when you’re winning games.
“This is our plea to you, the fans, come and stick with us now, come and stick with us when times are troubled and when we’re having a tough time.
“Get with us, come and get behind us, support us on Saturday, hope the players respond and if it’s Morgan Feeney or Ryan Bowman they want to applaud at the end of the game, then by all means do it. Let’s support us first.”
Whatever goes on transfer wise on Friday the main focus of the day will be preparing the squad for the Saturday game.
“The first thing to say is that the priority for us is the players who are here,” he said. “We make sure they’re prepared properly for the game against Shrewsbury. We get them in, we’ll do training as normal, we’ll do the opposition analysis as normal, and talk about how we’re going to play, get the session out of the way.
“I hope we’ll have somebody in that might be able to be involved at the weekend but I can’t legislate for that. That will all take care of itself.
“Once the players are done and dusted and had their lunch and gone home, then I’ll focus on the other bits and pieces.
“It’s not just about the group for Saturday, it’s about the whole football club. There are lots of other things that go into managing Carlisle United, maybe not as a head coach of Manchester City might have to do it, but here I do, so I’ll continue to do it and it’s a job I’m really enjoying doing, so it’s not a problem.”