Ben Heneghan is back in the reckoning to face Swindon Town at Plough Lane on Saturday after serving his one-match suspension.
The towering centre-back (pictured) had formed an impressive centre-back partnership with Will Nightingale before being sent off at Accrington Stanley for two bookable offences. Paul Kalambayi deputised superbly in the midweek victory versus Ipswich, so Mark Robinson will have to decide who lines up at the heart of our defence against the Robins.
Our Head Coach had good news to report today with Terell Thomas and Shayon Harrison having made significant progress in recent weeks.
“We are all good,” said Robbo. “We have players coming back who won’t be ready for tomorrow, but it was so great down at the training ground today. As well as doing our stuff, we had Terell and Shayon in the background working really hard with Chris, which is fantastic. They are two popular lads and after training everyone stopped and watched them for five minutes while Chris put them through their paces.”
In his interview at the training ground today, Robbo spoke enthusiastically about the squad’s application to match analysis, as they seek to maintain the recent improvement.
“I’m a massive believer in empowerment and producing people who take ownership because I think you get long-term results from it,” added Robbo. “You want people who can recognise and understand situations, before acting on it there and then. We talked a little bit about the Ipswich game and them going down to 10 men. Possibly we didn’t dominate as much as we would have liked. It was a very dominating performance overall, but there were elements against 10 men that we would have liked to have done better. The players admitted that they didn’t recognise the little situations that were going on well enough.
“Our match analysis sessions now are so interactive. When we started it would be 80 per cent me and 20 per cent the players and now there has been a complete shift with it being 60 per cent the players and 40 per cent me. I want to get it to that stage where it’s 80 per cent them and 20 per cent me. That’s one of the things that’s really pleasing because once they are doing that they feel more confident and empowered. They will become better decision-makers and react to things a lot quicker.
“We have to be relentless in everything we do, so there is no let-up at all. We had a great training session yesterday, but today they needed a little bit of a liven up. Not because they’ve dropped standards, just because the environment is enjoyable at the moment. We have to make sure that when we go to work, we go to work, so it needed a bit of a liven up, but the session was good.”
Click on the link below to watch Rob Cornell’s full interview with Robbo.