Dale catching up
KEITH Hill will urge his players to maintain the performance levels they produced in the 1-1 draw against AFC Wimbledon at the weekend as their League One safety pursuit picks up pace.
Despite falling behind to an early goal in the weekend’s clash, Dale went on to dominate and Hill admitted the players were disappointed not to get three points.
But he was keen to focus on the positives ahead of last night’s game against Fleetwood Town.
And, while everyone of a Dale persuasion would have preferred the win, Hill’s men did narrow the gap between themselves and the safety zone.
“It could prove a special point, we don’t know,” he said. “We are in good form – we’ve won two and drawn two of the last four games. That’s where our starting point is and we have to continue. We are making points up on our opponents above us, even though it’s not at the rate of knots that we expected having won away at Walsall and Rotherham.
“The last two games have not been a hiccup, but they have sort of slowed us down a little bit. But we are catching up, we’re within five points and I wanted to be within five points with ten games to go – we have another two games, so let’s see where we are then. We are making points up on our opponents and that’s important.”
The pitch covers were down immediately after the game on Saturday with Tuesday’s match against Fleetwood in mind, when Hill’s men had the chance to pull John Sheridan’s side closer to the drop zone.
And Hill said he’ll be asking for more of the same from his players.
“It’s the same message for Tuesday’s game and it’s got to be – these are games of football, they’re not life threatening! People lose their jobs, of course they do, but that’s not life threatening,” he said. “It’s a game of football and why put pressure on a group of players who know the situation they are in? There’s pressure in that situation.
“I don’t like the anxiety when it comes, ten minutes from the end or when Harrison McGahey gets the ball on halfway and passes it back. It’s something that needs to be accepted and again, we are not going to railroad ourselves to safety.
“We have to be meticulous in the way we do things, we have got to be patient and we can’t bring any negativity to suppress the players from what they need to do. There was a phase of play in the first half when we went back to Josh Lillis and it was brilliant – that’s the way we play and that’s the way we will continue to play, with a little bit of bravery.
“I have previously said to the players and the press that we will lose football matches over the course of the next twelve games, it’s not going to run according to plan or what everyone expects of this ‘great escape’, it going to probably go to the last week of the season if we are going to retain our League One status because it always does – we’ve been there most if not all of the season now.”
Hill will not be paying too much attention to the results of teams in and around Dale, focussing instead on his own side.
“The league’s the league, we know who we have to play and we have to try to make the most of that. There’s no point us looking at the league, or results, we just have to take care of business and we went a long way on Saturday towards taking care of business.
“It’s been a season of narrow margins. We just have to make sure in the next twelve games that we turn those narrow margins in our favour and with performances like that, we will. We have to keep the spirit up, we have to keep the confidence high and keep working meticulously with this group of players on the training pitch to get what we want from them. If we do we will turn the corner and we will have League One safety. But there’s no pressure on the players to achieve that because it’s a difficult task.” ROCHDALE Hornets head coach Alan Kilshaw branded his side a ‘disgrace’ despite their 20-8 win at Normanton Knights in the fourth round of the Challenge Cup.
Hornets picked up the win away from home to progress into the fifth round of the competition, but even though Kilshaw’s men came out on top against a National Conference Premier Division side at the LD Nutrition Stadium, he was still extremely disappointed with what he saw.
“Some of our efforts were a disgrace. It’s the most disappointed I’ve been with a win in my entire coaching career,” he said.
“It was difficult for both sides because of the weather. It slowed down our passing and in the last 20 minutes we couldn’t see at one point, but that