‘We’ve just got to get the balance right’ between defence and attack
HAD FAITH IN GROUP TO PUT THINGS RIGHT
DAVID Artell has placed the focus on Grimsby Town on finding the “balance” between defence and attack, with taking the big chances key to success for the rest of the season.
The Mariners have certainly raised their game in certain aspects, through difficult conversations and hard, honest work on the training ground, in addition to tactical tweaks, which have built a foundation for better performances and results.
There are still plenty of gains to be made for just the rest of this season alone for the club to be able to reflect on the campaign with an element of positivity with how it might end, and the goal for Artell, his staff and players now is to find those marginal gains.
Against Sutton United, Town did enough to justify being comfortable victors, even to the point where the opposition manager believed the same, but it did not come to be for a few reasons.
The only reason worth expending energy on at this stage with the result set in stone is that Grimsby were not ruthless enough, and they have to find that edge to their game now in unison with defensive solidity to get the most out of the end-of-season run-in. Work continues on that aspect, as Artell has explained recently, with the games coming thick and fast in recent weeks and the challenges growing in difficulty on paper as we move forward.
The Mariners head coach said: “In a week like we’ve e just had with three games, there is a lot of ‘classroom’ work, looking back at footage of previous games and analysing our next opponents. If we’re talking purely in-possession play we had better moments against Doncaster and Walsall than we have in the last few. “Obviously, the upside to our recent performances and the reason we’ve got better results is because we’ve been much harder to beat so we have to try and strike a balance between the two which includes taking our chances in front of goal. “The good thing is that the players have already shown they can do what we want them to because they’ve shown they can on the training pitch, and we’ve just tried to reinforce certain points recently without taking away from the improvements we’ve made defensively. “If we can get the balance right, then we’re not just going to look really solid but also threatening at the other end of the pitch, and that is the challenge for us going forward.” Artell maintained he always had faith in the group to put things right after their horrible start to the calendar year, and he hopes now there will not be an imbalance in form once that balance is struck.
He added: “Even during the tough moments, we knew that with the hard work, the players were putting in on the training ground, it was only a matter of time before it showed. “There was not an obvious answer as to why that only materialised away from home to begin with, because if I knew then we wouldn’t have had the defeats we did have at home. We’ve just got to get the balance right.”
ARTELL ALWAYS