FAR TOO EARLY TO TALK TITLES
JIMMY Dean won’t get carried away by Peterborough Sports’ perfect start – and the boss still doesn’t understand their favourites tag!
The Turbines have won their first five Southern League Premier Central matches including a memorable 8-4 victory over Stourbridge last Saturday.
Perhaps more impressively, they followed it up with a 1-0 Bank Holiday Monday win at AFC Rushden & Diamonds less than 48 hours later to leave them two points clear.
“Saturday was mental,” said Dean, who saw striker Josh Moreham score a seven-minute hat-trick before Stourbridge pulled three goals back from 6-1. “They kept coming, at 6-4 we were getting nervous. They’re a team littered with good players and deserve credit.
“They played 3-5-2 and pushed their wing backs high on to our full-backs and it just made for a basketball game. I had a choice to drop my wingers in to mark them so we had the overload defensively but I just thought no, we’re at home, we’re winning, I’m not doing it.”
Despite the victory Dean says his side copped some criticism for conceding four.
They responded by keeping their third clean sheet of the season despite suffering with injuries.
“The Monday actually gave me a lot more pleasure,” Dean told The NLP. “I went into the changing room as if we had lost on Saturday. We forgot about the eight and focused on the four. I addressed the back four situation and the mistakes.
Bizarre
“We ended up with a centre-mid and a full-back out wide to end the game. It was a really patched-up side. The target in my head was four points over the weekend and we got six.”
It made for another happy trip back to Devon for Dean who has spent the last three weeks on holiday on the south coast.
He’s clocked over 3,000 miles travelling to and from matches, but the successful boss wouldn’t change the valuable time he’s spent with his family – or his team.
“Winning and losing actually plays second fiddle to being back playing football, which sounds bizarre but I’m just happy to have it back,” added Dean. “I’ve got three lovely kids and my first job’s being a dad – I’d say the same if I was manager of Liverpool. My little boy has come with me to every game.”
Dean also surpassed 200 matches as Peterborough Sports manager this season with a win ratio hitting 70 per cent.
The Turbines had won three promotions in four seasons before Covid halted their progress when they were top of the Premier Central in 2019-20.
For that reason, coupled with the summer signing of striker Michael Gash, many had Sports down as title favourites, but Dean, only last month, labelled them a “mid-table side”.
“I don’t really understand the furore about us,” he said. “People were going on about us this year but it’s the same team. We signed Gash who moves the squad forward but lost Paul Malone, our centre-back.
“I’m not getting excited after five games when only two years ago we wanted to stay in the division with a bottom-six budget. I don’t worry too much about the outside noise. We just worry about us, there are 35 games to go.”