Pre-season friendlies finished for Welling United when they defeated an Erith and Belvedere team 3-1 on Tuesday evening and manager Lee Martin is now looking forward to the new season starting this weekend.
Manager Lee Martin used that game to give the players a run-out who had not featured much in recent game, giving them a chance to make an impression ahead of Saturday’s opening league match at Cheshunt. It also provided him with a last look at a couple of trialists, including a first viewing of one who has just become available.
“There were opportunities for boys to go out there and give me a headache.” he said. “They didn’t disappoint but they didn’t do everything that we required. A lot of boys haven’t played together, they’ve been away or got injured but over the course of the season they’ll be used, but it’s mainly about where people are at now. We’ll reflect on it and look at it on Thursday, see how the boys come in and then we’ll pick our eleven to go out there. We speak about ‘horses for courses’. Not every game that we’ll play requires certain players, and that’s going to be our general blueprint.”
Preparation for the Cheshunt game has been intense. Martin said “We’ve spent eight hours this week looking back at clips and footage from Cheshunt and also videos of our games. We’ve got some fantastic options. Are we always going to get it right? No, but we’re going to make sure that we try and plug in our values and key principles throughout and, over the long term, we’ll know more about the players and profile of player that we’ll pick for certain games.”
Martin is not content to settle on videos alone and spoke about how happy he is with the work undertaken by one of his management team who has doubled up as a scout. “Credit to Rich. Without Rich we’d have been really struggling. He’s been superb for me. He’s leant his hand to many issues that we’ve found over the course of the last four or five weeks. He’s seen Cheshunt twice, live, so we know varied patterns and ideas that we might come up against.”
During the pre-season campaign, many different shapes have been tried out including three at the back, or a back four. Martin said. “There will be games when we go to a back four. As you saw, we had a left back available today so we can play a back four but if we’re playing a back four with a left back that doesn’t have a left foot, or doesn’t want to play with his left foot, that’s always going to be affecting the balance of the team. We don’t put square pegs in round holes. We want the right personnel to fit the system and it’s important that we looked at two systems.”
Only Cameron Andrews remains in the squad from last season and Martin is realistic enough to know that they will need time. He admitted “You can’t build a new squad and expect it to happen overnight. We’re unwavering, we’re relentless. We’re going to push on, push on, push on. There’s nothing that we won’t do behind the scenes that we could be doing. We’re looking at clips on teams we’re about to play. We’re looking at our clips.
“We had a meeting before the game (against Erith and Belvedere). We’ll show them bits about how Cheshunt do it, and we’ll also have a look at our good bits because sometimes we get caught up on how better can we be, rather than let’s look at the good stuff, so there’s some real positives.”
Now that the friendlies are over, Martin will be looking for the team to be ruthless. “By hook or by crook it’s about winning games of football now.” he said. “At the minute it’s a little bit wishy washy, and everyone’s protecting. If I see some of the stuff that I’ve seen over the last four weeks in real time on Saturday, I won’t be happy but I know that players like to protect.
“I was always one who went full tilt, but that was just my mindset and my make up, but I do get it, I understand it completely, and sometimes you just want to get through it and get to that point.
“We’re still building something special.” he continued. “It takes more than a couple of games to gel a squad of twenty-two players. You’ve seen signs, you’ve seen progress, and we’ll continue that way and I won’t look past the outcome that’s there. We’ll just continue on that journey. I know we’ve had some backlash but I’ve had that in football for my whole life so that’s water off a duck’s back. I’ll continue to be me, I’ll be relentless and I’ll make sure that I do it right.”
Only eleven players can start and some of the squad won’t even be on the substitute’s bench. Martin accepts that he will have to break the news to the disappointed players. He confirmed “It’s never nice, but ultimately they’ve had umpteen opportunities to go out and prove it so do you look at the mirror, or do you look out of the window?
“You’ve got to self reflect. You can always have that sort of moment when you think ‘life ain’t fair’ but that’s football. I want to see a reaction from these boys who do get left out. I’ll never cut off my nose to spite my face. They’ll always be involved. They’ll always be around it. I’ll always tell them the truth. There’s no grey area with me. It’s black and white. They’ll know where they stand and if they fill different, there’s always a conversation.”
Picture supplied by Keith Gillard.