Rebels need a winning run to realise play-off dreams
Slough Town FC: Bayliss proud of Yeovil stalemate but accepts wins are required to achieve top seven finish
Defences were on top as Slough Town held likely league champions Yeovil Town to a goalless draw at Arbour Park on Saturday, however, defender Dan Bayliss acknowledges the Rebels really must go on a winning run if they’re to realise their dream of finishing in the play-offs.
Bayliss and his fellow defenders were delighted to hold out the runaway league leaders at Arbour Park and extend the club’s unbeaten home run in all competitions to 19 matches.
But the result leaves the Rebels eight points behind seventh-placed St Albans City with eight league left games to play.
Whether or not Scott Davies’ side are able to catch their play-off rivals, it’s still been an excellent season for a club who were many people’s tip for relegation when the season kicked off. Those fears were only heightened when the side was sat bottom after losing six of its opening seven matches, however, their 5-2 home defeat to Tonbridge Angels back in early September was the last time the
Rebels have tasted defeated on their own patch.
They may have lost a little momentum in their play-off chase with the abandonment of their game against Bath City - a match they were leading 4-2 with 20 minutes to play - and last week's 2-1 defeat at Havant & Waterlooville, however, positive results at home to Eastbourne Borough on Saturday and Taunton Town on Monday evening could yet supercharge their play-off challenge.
Speaking to the Express this week, Bayliss said he was proud of the side’s defensive effort against the Glovers: “Yeah, to be fair, we’ve had a few games this season where we feel we should have kept clean sheets, and we haven’t.
“And we’ve had other games that have been quite high scoring. At the end of the day, the most important thing is the result, but as a defender, me, Scotty (Davies) Temi (Eweka) and Lincs (Dan Lincoln) will tell you we want a clean sheet.
“We strive to get clean sheets and we probably haven’t done it as much as we should this season. But there’s still a handful of games left between now and the end of the season when hopefully we can pick up a few more.
“It was nice to keep a clean sheet on Saturday against a team that looks like it will win the league and it’s looked that way since the first few games of the season. We’re proud to keep that clean sheet on Saturday.
“I think both defences were on top. They’ve got a few very good defenders, and they have some very solid players at that level. Both defences were on top, there weren’t any real clear-cut chances that I can remember, but as a defender you take that and on another day our strikers maybe grab another one or two goals and we grab the points. We’re happy with where we’re at and, as a unit, we feel that if we keep more clean sheets we’re going to win more games because we back our forward players to get those goals. To hold a team like Yeovil, who are running away with the league and probably shouldn’t be at this level. To hold them to a draw is a good result. We are probably in a position where we need to win games to get to the play-offs. We need to be winning rather than drawing, but we’re never looking too far ahead. As cliché as it is we take one game at a time. We’ve just got to control what we can and see where that takes us.”
The Rebels can extend their unbeaten run to 20 matches on Saturday when Eastbourne Borough visit Arbour Park and while the club are currently languishing in the National League South relegation zone, Bayliss insisted they wouldn’t take that result for granted.
“The league is so tight,” he said. “I don’t know the exact points that separates teams, but I know it’s close. A lot of the games we have remaining are against teams in the play-offs and those threatened by relegation, so if you look at it that way, if we can beat the teams around us in the play-offs we’ll claw back points on them. We’ll just take it one game at a time, take the points where we can and see where that takes us, and hopefully that’s the play-offs.”
The Rebels have also had a nasty habit of slipping up against sides threatened with the drop this season, as their results against Havant & Waterlooville and Dover illustrate. This has been the only frustration for assistant manager Tony Fontenelle.
He said: “We've had the low at the start of the season and the high of recent times, but it's just unfortunate that we've dropped points against the teams that have been in those relegation spots away from home. But Saturday was a really pleasing point from a psychological point of view.
“Everyone, bar one or two of the so-called experts had us to finish in the bottom four. So in terms of our first objectives, we feel that we've met one. Now, the next one is we've got an outside chance of the play-offs and if we did make it, it would be unbelievable, but we're not putting ourselves under any pressure or putting the lads under pressure. We're just taking it one game at a time.”