Team news for Saturday
Simon Bassey updated us with the latest news from the training ground this afternoon as our squad prepared for Saturday’s trip to Bradford City.
Speaking to Dons Player, our first-team coach said the squad had been working hard to eradicate the defensive errors that contributed to our 6-2 defeat at Burton Albion on Tuesday night. Simon believes that the squad will come out fighting at Valley Parade on Saturday after the players were forced to watch the DVD of the match at the Pirelli Stadium.
“It was one of those days that you never want to put people through,” Simon said. “We are honest with each other and Tuesday’s performance was not good enough. We sat down for four or five hours with the group yesterday and they were left in no uncertain terms that the performance was not acceptable. We looked at the video and today we tried to put that into practice on the training ground. The key now is for us to bounce back and eradicate that performance at Burton.
“I think we will see a totally different Bradford side from the side that we played last season with Phil Parkinson having had time to put his own stamp on the squad during the summer. I expect a really tough game as they will be one of the top teams, but we will back ourselves to go there and give a good account of ourselves. We have got good memories from last season when we went there and acquitted ourselves well and hopefully we can do that on Saturday.”
Curtis Osano has returned to training, but is unlikely to be ready, along with Rashid Yussuff, who suffered an ankle injury as a second-half substitute at Burton on Tuesday. Bradford have injury problems of their own with Parkinson still without his first-choice central midfield partnership of Ritchie Jones and skipper Ricky Ravenhill. However, Bradford were still strong enough to beat Fleetwood Town on Tuesday night with Nathan Doyle doing a more than useful job in the midfield engine room.