Browse Sections

• Stockport County FC
• Sale Sharks
• Local football
• Local cricket

So now it's the play-offs!

30/ 4/2008

JIM Gannon spoke of both positives and negatives immediately after watching his County side slide out of the automatic promotion race on Saturday.

A cute lobbed effort from Tommy Rowe wasn’t enough at Underhill, as the Hatters went down to goals from Jason Puncheon and Cliff Akurang while Hereford cruised to victory at Brentford and celebrated going up alongside MK Dons and Peterborough.

Gannon said: "The lads are very, very disappointed, but I’m disappointed for our fans. They came all the way here with high hopes and expectations, but we didn’t really give ourselves a chance of winning the game.

"The bottom line is that you have to defend well, you have to be strong and you have to play some good football.

"We didn’t do that enough today."

Now though, it’s time for Gannon and his men to start thinking about the play-offs, although, of course, two regular season games still needed to be tackled.

Gannon added: "We’ll remind the players of what they’ve achieved and what they’re capable of achieving, but we can take a look at these next two games now and they’re not that important.

"On Tuesday night against Chester obviously we’ll respect the fact that we’ll have a large contingent of fans there, but from my point of view, I’ve now got the chance to chase things up and let a few players recover.

"There were four or five who were excellent again today, but that wasn’t enough.

"We do need four or five players to step up a gear if we are going to be successful in the play-offs."

There is a full week’s break after next weekend’s home clash against Brentford before the League Two play-offs get under way on May 10, and Gannon confirmed that he and his players will be totally prepared, whoever the opposition may be.

The Hatters boss added: "I’d rather play away first, but it doesn’t really bother me.

"I don’t fear any of the other teams [Rochdale, Darlington and Wycombe], but we’ll prepare well for whichever of the three teams we meet.

"Some opposing managers might try to play games and talk about away tactics and home tactics, but we’ll just play with the same mentality home and away.

"We don’t need necessarily to look at the prize, that will look after itself, we just need to look for performances.

"We’d have settled for this at the beginning of the season, it’s all about making progress.

"You’ve no idea how much we’ve been handicapped this year by things within the club, so to achieve what we’ve achieved already this year has been remarkable."