Below are selected highlights from Wednesday afternoon’s press conference. You can find the full audio above or in your We Are Terriers podcast feed, including Antony Evans’ contribution.
Adam Pope (BBC Radio Leeds): After his illness, is Alfie May fit to play at the weekend?
Alfie is fit, he’s trained all week, so that’s good news. He’s trained well. We’ve pushed the lads the past couple of days so it’s been a good few days to see the lads on the grass working hard.
AP: What’s Lynden Gooch’s situation?
Yeah, we’re starting to integrate now. The weekend will be too early for him, but he’s definitely moving in the right direction.
AP: Anybody else fit for action or not fit for action that you can tell us about?
[Radinio Balker] is unfortunately going to be probably best the part of four weeks with an adductor injury. It’s disappointing. I think he’d obviously put a run of games together and was performing well, so it’s disappointing to lose him, but it’s part and parcel, unfortunately, of the programme that we run and the schedule and the game. So yeah, disappointed to lose him, but it means obviously someone else needs to step up.
AP: The chairman issued last night a big rallying cry on his social media to the supporters, basically saying ‘get down and support us’ in a nutshell — how do you feel about that when you hear the chairman do that?
I think start with the chairman’s agenda, and I think what can never be questioned is the support, the backing, his intention for the club. I think he’s desperate to be successful here, the same as we all are.
I think we’ve all got the same goal, and I think sometimes you get bumps along the way and different challenges. I think we all want to achieve the same thing, and any club that, for me, has any level of success is when everybody’s pulling in the same direction.
So again, I think going to the final stage of the season with ten to go, it’s definitely that: let’s all leave everything out there. And again, I think that for me, when I look at the teams, that have done it in the past, it’s when you’ve got that unity and that force from all angles, whether it be from the stands, whether it be on the pitch, whether it be from the senior leaders at the club, the owner…it’s that collective.
We all want to do well, trust me, we all want to go out and perform to the highest level and play to our best, and produce a style that entertains the fans as well as winning and getting points as well. We want to try and tick everything, which is challenging at times, it’s difficult, especially when you’ve had transition and change, etc.
But for me, I think we’re in a position where we’ve still got so much to play for, so let’s leave it all out there and let’s make sure that in the final ten that we give absolutely everything.
Steven Chicken (We Are Terriers): I think a lot of the fans’ objection on Saturday was a bit of a feeling that there was a lack of endeavour from the team. We spoke on Saturday about being man marked out of the game, there weren’t a lot of options all the time — but I think it made the fans feel the intentions of the team weren’t clear. Is that something you’ve worked on this week when it comes to the on the ball work?
Yeah, definitely. I watch every game back once, sometimes twice, I'm terribly obsessive, and I totally get it.
I think there’s little moments in the game where we definitely [struggle]. That’s the challenge of when you’ve had such a short period and you’re trying to evolve. The team when we came here had scored loads of goals and conceded loads of goals, so you might want to make it a bit harder to beat. You lose some of the goal scorers, you can only concentrate your efforts in certain areas, and personally, I think we’ve got better defensively across the games that we’ve been here.
Some of the expense of that is probably some of the attacking stuff. I watched us at the weekend, and at moments we turned down opportunities to go forward, definitely. They’re the bits [we need to work on], I think, and then it’s tough sometimes.
It’s never through a lack of intent or will or wanting to do well. It’s the challenge that you have, and that’s why with the coaching behind it, it’s so important to show them pictures and say ‘right, why have we gone square or back there when we could play forward? Why have we thrown it back when we could go forward? Why have we gone square when we could cross it in the box?’
It’s affecting the bravery and the risk taking, and naturally I think sometimes when there’s an edge, there’s an uneasiness to it, in every walk of life, it’s not easy to be brave, and there’s an element of pressure, and you feel that little bit.
So for me, it’s very much giving the lads the confidence to go and do that, go and take risks and be brave, and if it doesn’t come off, then correct it by responding in the right way — positive body language, working hard, all the bits that I bang on about I think in most interviews. [If we’re going to get it wrong then] let’s get it wrong by taking the risk of being brave and not by shying away from it.
