Boro' boss Graham Westley spoke to his club's official website and the Stevenage Comet ahead of his side's League One game against Carlisle at Brunton Park tomorrow afternoon, Westley having watched the Blues lose 1-0 at Bramall Lane on Wednesday night:
“It was an interesting game in the sense that Sheffield United looked a very tired side, they had played on the Sunday and obviously had a day less of rest than Carlisle. You could see at the end that the energy levels of the Carlisle players were good, they took the game to Sheffield United for large parts, and certainly on the second-half showing deserved to get something out of it, if not all three points. So, they have got good players and they will be a tough proposition at home.
“They certainly have a player or two who would get into a select team at this level. We know that their place and their team won't make it easy. We do not underestimate how tough a place it is to go. They always seek to gain an advantage from the officials and to officiate so it is always a tough place to go. There are no easy places to go to and we are fighting for our lives. We are under no illusions about the size of the task and what we have to do to win.”
“You would hope that physically they won’t be quite at the level they would have been if they hadn’t have played 24 hours after ourselves. There is nothing you can do about that, the recover y time that you isn’t there when you play Wednesday night, when you play Tuesday night you get that extra 24 hours. So, obviously that is a physical advantage that we hope we can take advantage of.
“We have done what we do to get ready between a Tuesday and a Saturday. There is a lot of hard preparatory work to do and in all regards the players are putting themselves to the job at the moment and are getting themselves ready to go again. It is great when you have got these games Tuesday-Saturday, a lot of people don’t like it but I do like it. Physically we are a strong side, we have got that endurance base, we can go and go again."
“At this time of the year we really relish the opportunity just to keep playing games. You are in football to play games and at this time of year you get a lot of them. Psychologically now we have climbed out of the hole of the bottom four, but we all know that if we don’t continue to move away from it then we will slip back in. That isn’t a place any of us enjoy being in, it is not a place we want to be in and it is not a place that we have got any intentions of going back to.
“So, from our point of view the only thing we can do to ensure we keep climbing is to win. We go there tomorrow and with three points we move further away and that is the job in hand. We want to finish in the top half of the table and to do that we've got to win a lot of points. We've got 33 points we can win. If we keep posting points, there is no reason why we can't finish in the top half.
“In a quiet moment I would look at the situation I inherited, you don’t inherit 14 defeats in 17 just because the manager is not very good, and that’s not a comment on the previous manager, I’m just saying it isn’t just a manager when you lose 14 in 17. You can give a good group of players a bad manager and trust me they would win football matches.
“So when you lose 14 in 17 you’ve got some bad players, some bad people and some bad players, it doesn’t happen for no reason. And turning it around is not easy because some of those people are contracted and their losing ways, you’re stuck with. We’ve played a lot of games with players who are happy enough losing games, and it’s difficult. But, I think the tide is turning, there are more people who want to win games and if you’ve got players who want to win games and know how to win games, you’ve got a chance.
“There are a lot of cogs in any machine and the whole machine has been firing much more strongly. The team spirit since we cleared the decks in January and saw nine out the door the team spirit changed completely. The influences that were perhaps detrimental to the forward movement of the team have been removed and they have been replaced by people who are adding to the momentum.”