Baggies breaker
ACCRINGTON Stanley manager John Coleman says Tuesday’s victory over West Brom U21 in the EFL Trophy was vital in order to break his side’s run of games without a win.
The Reds had gone three league matches without a victory heading into the fixture with the Baggies, with those matches seeing the team drop out of the League One play-off places on goal difference.
They managed to get back on track with the 2-1 triumph against West Brom, with Jordan Clark and Ross Sykes getting the goals for Stanley, cancelling out a strike from Jonathan Leko for the visitors.
Coleman was glad to return to winning ways, and thought it was impor- tant ahead of this weekend’s FA Cup first round clash against Colchester United.
“It’s important that we won because we’ve been quite good this season and had a bank of winning five out of six, but then we hit a sticky patch where we’ve drew two and lost one, so we wanted to get back to winning ways,” he said.
“You can forget how to win sometimes and it becomes a habit, so thankfully we’ve got that out of the way and hopefully we’ll take it into Saturday’s game.
“It will be a difficult match against Colchester. They’re riding high in League Two and have scored plenty of goals this season, so it will be tough, but we’re capable of giving anybody a tough game as well.”
This weekend’s opponents Colchester are in third place in the League Two table, having won nine of their 17 games so far this season.
They head into the match at the Wham Stadium on the back of a victory, having defeated Swindon Town 1-0 last weekend.
The win for Stanley over West Brom on Tuesday means they have already qualified for the knockout round of the EFL Trophy with one game remaining.
Their final match in the group stage sees them take on Blackpool next Tuesday, and while Coleman is expected to make further changes to the team, he won’t be taking the match lightly.
“We have good competition for places and that’s what we’ve always wanted here. We’ll take the game against Blackpool as serious as we took Tuesday’s game and as serious as we’ll take this weekend’s game,” he said. “We want to win every game we play and I think you have to go out with that mindset.
“The players on the pitch certainly do that as they ran themselves into the ground on Tuesday and do it in training every day as well. I honestly can’t fault them and they’re a great set of lads who are good to be around.”