Whitley’s management team were obviously happy with the victory over Whickham on Saturday but were certainly not getting carried away with the success.
”We’re pleased we started off with a win” commented Tony Fawcett “but we’re a little bit wary of not taking the chances we’ve had. We had a good number, more than a handful of chances. We should have been finishing them off. We’ll get punished by teams if we don’t score them. But overall, in terms of performance I’m pretty pleased.”
While agreeing with those thoughts, Derek Forrest added “People’s contributions today were good. We cannot be too judgemental too early. I think Whickham would have been delighted if they’d had the chances we had. We’ve still got Shanksy to come in and as the season goes on I think we’ll score more goals. To be fair the second goal was a fantastic individual effort by young Joe and it’s really helped us. And the way it turned out with the own goal, it proves to me that in football you’re not over the line with two! By the end of the game we should have been well clear and not in that position... but that’s football.”
Tony Fawcett was full of praise for Jon Weirs in setting up the first goal and his contribution throughout the game. “Jon got the ball on the half way line and played it perfectly, and laid it on a plate. You always fancy Richie (Coulson) one on one. It was a really good passage of play. Jon carried an injury last season and had to sit and wait for his chance but today I thought he was terrific and put a real shift in, played a bit wider than he normally does and got us the rewards from it.”
Tony was impressed with the two debutants in the starting line up, “I thought Ishi (Lama) was outstanding today, He’s the sort of lad who’s not going to get a lot of recognition because he’s not going to be a regular goal scorer but he goes around and breaks so much up and stops attacks. I thought he was excellent. As for Joe, we know what Joe’s s about, he’s quality, his movement is brilliant, his touch is excellent and he’s going to score more goals is Joe.“
Derek highlighted the extra depth in the squad this season “We’re really pleased with that, we’ve got 21 players and could only use 16 today. The lads understand the need to make changes with so many games coming up, but we can change now that we’ve got the depth. It’s a classic football situation, if you’ve got the shirt and you play well you keep the shirt.”
Summing up the day he concluded “It’s great to get a win, it’s probably all we wanted today we’re absolutely delighted to get the three points. It looked closer than we’d have wanted but even after the unlucky own goal, we still went down the other end and caused havoc and nearly made it 3-1”
