A result will see belief come flooding back

LEE CROFT

The Latics player writes every week for Chron Sport
EVERY one of the injured lads wishes they could be out there helping the team right now, and I am no different.

I have been out running on my injured ankle again this week so hopefully it won’t be too long now. The plan is to get a full week of training in next week, with a view to making myself available to the manager for the Millwall game.

After picking up two wins on the bounce, we really needed to take that into our most recent fixtures. We lost to Barnsley and then to Southend and I think the confidence was a little bit down before we were beaten at Crewe, which was clearly a bad result.

Getting that belief back really comes down to picking up positive results. Even in the sequence we have had, there have been signs of our not giving up on anything.

We pulled level against Barnsley and looked like we could go on to win that game. In coming back to 3-2 against Southend the same was true that night too. I don’t honestly think we are too far away.

We need to keep things tight at the back, as we have players who can always nick a goal or two.

I am sure the gaffer will have been working very hard with the defence on the training ground again this week to try to prevent us leaking those sloppy goals.

Bramall Lane awaits tomorrow, in the FA Cup. It’s both a great stadium and a really good game for us, providing a breather from the league campaign. I am absolutely gutted to be missing it and I know that the others in a similar position are, too.

Hopefully, we can go there and bring back a positive result. Every time I have been with this club, we have been involved in unbelievable cup runs where we have taken some amazing scalps.

I am sure the lads who go out there tomorrow at 3pm will want nothing more than to get through and then land another Premier League club to give us a chance again at a giant-killing.