MarkHeadBonner coach
Tonight is another challenging game as you can always expect from a Steve Evans team and another club well established now in League One. Gillingham had an excellent season last year and will no doubt hope to build on that this season with some good experience in their team and a powerful group of players. We will need to be aggressive and dominant to make sure we are competitive in the game. We hope to add to Saturday’s point against Fleetwood Town, a result that was tinged with disappointment as we had a number of good chances and defended well to limit their opportunities in the second half, once we had got ourselves in front. I thought the two goals we scored were of excellent quality and our wide players were superb throughout the game. What is clear from the replays is that we should have had a penalty in the last minute of the game. Sam Smith was pulled down in the box and incredibly, he was adjudged to have made a foul. The only other option other than a penalty was to allow our promising attack to continue. They say decisions balance themselves out over the season and we hope that plays out as we have had two big ones incorrectly go against us this season. The first being that we should have played at Plymouth against 10 men for a red card offence by a
Pilgrims defender, who was later to be banned for 3 games by The FA. After today we travel up to Crewe, at which point we will be at the 10-game marker in the season It is still early days of course but it is a marker that gives us time to reflect and see how we have started. We need to focus on consistency and point scoring on as many days as possible and the ability to put together consecutive wins or point scoring days will prove crucial to us throughout the season. In the past few weeks we have really started to feel the club come back to full life and normal times. I have sat in an all-staff meeting at the stadium for the first time in 18 months, spoken at the Community Trust Strategy launch event, the Business 100 Club with our club partners and spent some time with Darren Marjoram at the training ground as we seek to improve the link and support with the Women’s team. All the component parts that make up our club are special and underscore just how much impact we can have across the city. The momentum and the atmosphere has been great so far around the ground and on Matchdays, and here’s hoping that we can all keep working well to maintain it. ■ www.cambridge-united.co.uk
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