Below are selected highlights from Monday afternoon’s press conference. You can find the full audio above or in your We Are Terriers podcast feed.
Liam Manning
Louis Reynolds (BBC Radio Leeds): You’ve almost set that bar now, haven’t you, for what fans can expect from your side?
Yeah, and let’s be clear, I’ve used that with the lads. I think that’s the bit for me, is how do you make those behaviours into habit.
It’s like how the FA Cup’s a great competition, and you can raise your game for the odd one, but if you want to achieve anything and sustain success over a period of time and win game after game, you have to make the behaviours that we showed on Saturday habit, and that’s the bit that we’ve spoken to the lads about: the desire to run, the intensity, the duels, the togetherness, the spirit, the emotion, but the control with the emotion. I think that that’s equally important.
You saw so much of that on Saturday, and like I said, that’ll be my challenge. The players should be desperate to get out there tomorrow night, to go again, and we have to — win, lose or draw, play well, play poorly — what’s non-negotiable is showing the intent that we showed at the weekend.
LR: When you talk about habits and non-negotiables, how difficult or easy is it, from a coaching point of view, to ingrain that into players?
I think it depends on the group you work with, but I can’t speak highly enough of the lads since me, Martin and James have come in to work with them, I think they’ve been really receptive to the bits we’ve challenged them with.
I think football’s analysed so much nowadays that there’s so much made around rotation and shapes and patterns, and of course, there’s huge parts of those that are important, but what has to always underpin it is the will to win and the desire to work.
That’s what the lads have done since day one of us joining, and we have to push them to continually do that — and the second someone steps off it, it’s my job, it’s the staff’s job, but it’s also the [layers’ job to make sure that we hold each other to account, to what we expect in those behaviours. Saturday was a real, good example of what it has to look like.
LR: Chatting to some fans after the weekend…there’s 18 games to go, and yes, there is a bit of a gap between yourselves and the top two, but a lot of the consensus was ‘our season starts today’. What is in your mind the next 18 games? What’s the remit? How are you envisaging it unfolding?
We want to win as many as we can.
Any fan, any player, any staff member should dream big. You have to, I think. No-one wants me to come in here and squash ambition and dreams — you’d be mad to do that.
But we also have to understand, how do we do that? And that’s for me, where I chunk it up. 18 games is too far away to get targets and projections. We have to concentrate and get it right tomorrow, otherwise where we’re at in 18 games won’t be where we want it.
So like I said, there’s a real skill, and we have to celebrate the wins, we have to enjoy it, the same as we have to hurt after the losses, but you have to bounce back quickly — and that’s everyone associated with the club, and that’s what we have to do.
I said to the lads on Saturday, ‘enjoy it, go home, make sure then Sunday, you rest, you recover, and your head’s on Tuesday, then when we’re at the end of the season, look back and make sure we have no regrets on what we did in the 19 games that we had.’
Ryan Ledson
Louis Reynolds (BBC Radio Leeds): How have you found the first few days working under Liam?
Good, positive. I’ve played against his teams for the past two years in the Championship. He and his coaching staff have come in with real energy, real intent, so yeah, positive start so far.
LR: And on Saturday, it was the best start possible, wasn’t it? I mean, it was some atmosphere, some performance. Talk us through your reflections of that game.
Brilliant. Absolutely loved it from start to finish. I thought the energy in the ground from the fans was top, and we really fed off that.
I thought to a man, everyone was on top form, and we sort of we own them one. You look back at the game at their place, for the first half an hour, 35 minutes, we battered them, in all honesty, and that hurt us — it still did. So Saturday was about getting one back over on them, and really putting it to them, and I think we were unlucky not to be three up again at half time — we should have been. So, you know, it felt nice — but it’s just a start.
LR: There is, of course, a gap between yourselves and the top two. Is that still a realistic target for you as players?
Of course it is. But we’re not focusing on that at the minute, we’re focused on ourselves, focusing on game at a time, performances and points. If we get performances, we know in this league we’ll climb the table. So obviously, the aim is to win as many games as possible, including the cups.
LR: What’s the message been from Liam on that front?
It’s more positivity, more shackles off, just enjoy it. Like, obviously we’re all good players. It’s more the mental side of it and sort of us forgetting being us. It’s ‘be you, be what you come to the club for’, and that goes for everyone.
LR: Did you feel you need Liam to come in to release those shackles?
Yeah, listen, sometimes it’s a difficult one. If you can get yourself into a bit of a rut and getting the same messages, maybe just a little freshen up can kickstart people again, and hopefully that will be the case
