This Wednesday we start off with news of Ross Greenwoods leg injury, picked up at the weekend.
County are seeking second opinion from a specialist after it was thought the defender had fractured his leg, but although scans have shown no break, the club are looking for a second opinion. Overall our injury situation is not bad really as we go into the winter, and the squad is further boosted by Mickael Wolski who has returned to training, although Chris Turner has warned it could be some time before he’s back to full fitness.
Glad to see Matt Hamshaw agrees with my weighty opinion that County are in a false position.
Matt Hamshaw has admitted that County’s league position was false after knocking Leyton Orient off the top of League Two with a very creditable 2-2 draw on Saturday. The midfielder also revealed that when some of the floodlights went out during the second half, with the score at 2-2, the Hatters wanted to stay on as they felt they had a chance of going on and collecting the three points.
Matt is quoted ‘It was a good game. They’re top of the league and we knew that they were going to have a lot of the ball in the first half, which they did. But to be fair I thought we worked really hard. We felt quite unfortunate to concede another own goal but these things happen. Michael Raynes is a young player and he’s going to learn. He’s playing games now. It was just one of those unfortunate things. We said at half time, though, that we’d had three or four half chances in the first half and we knew that if we came out and started performing in the second half then we’d do well. ‘The referee came over to me when the floodlights went out and asked me what I wanted to do. It’s a long way to come and at 2-2 we felt that we could win it and I didn’t want to go off the pitch. If they’d have scored again to make it 3-2 then we might have gone over to the referee and had a word. But I thought that we were in the box seat and I wanted to carry on. To be fair it didn’t influence the game that much. It’s a bit weird when things like that happen because you never know whether the ref is going to take you off or leave you on.’
Matt continues ‘I love being captain because it’s a great honour. We’ve got a great set of young lads. People say that County are third from bottom and we are but we’ve been to Grimsby, we’ve been to Leyton Orient, we’ve played Wycombe, we’ve played Northampton, all promotion favourites and we’ve outplayed a lot of them. I think our league position is a bit false but these things happen. We feel that we should be higher but thinking about it is no good, we’ve got to do something about it.’
‘We’ve got a tough six-pointer coming up against Mansfield which is going to be a crucial game for us. We felt that we could get something from the game today and a point is a good result. Our away form has been good and apart from the freak result at Carlisle we feel we’ve done well, especially with a lot of young boys in the squad.’
Matt also had a few words of praise for the travelling Blue and White Army who went down to Brisbane Road in large numbers once again.
He added: ‘The fans were fantastic once again. I said to the players that if they are ever getting tired, just look over to our fans because they’ve spent a lot of money again and they never stopped singing.
They were the same at Carlisle which we keep apologising for because they never stopped then, even though we were 6-0 down.’
I hope somebody somewhere is keeping tabs on the performance of away fans throughout the league as this kind of Optima Index would show County fans in the upper reaches of the Premiership without a doubt. [pictured one of the travelling County fans from the coach that got lost – what you missed her? Tut tut] Blooo Army! Blooo Army! Blooo Army!
Stockport County will not be recruiting any new players ahead of Thursday’s ’emergency loan deadline’, were the words of Chris Turner.
Even though County are lying third bottom of League Two, only lost five out of their eighteen league games have been defeats this season. This has prompted County manager Turner not to add to the current squad, and not risking the possibility of ruining the general dynamics of what seems to be a very closely knit group of players.
Currently on loan at County are experienced defender Tony Vaughan and goalkeeper Carl Ikeme and therefore Turner is not able to stretch the club’s purse strings more to bring another player in.
Turner commented on the club as a whole ‘We haven’t got the resources to bring new faces in and strengthen the areas we would like. It’s going to be a difficult season and we have to break even, there’s no ‘hopefully’ about it.’
‘Out of the 92 clubs, a small minority make a profit, a small minority break even and the huge majority will lose thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions. Every department in the football club is affected by that and with the first-team squad playing a large part, obviously I have a responsibility with my budget.’.
Wise words Mr Turner. I wonder what former owner Mr Kennedy will say about County and finance. This will be the subject of another article.
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