Interview by Julian Tyley
A new month brought a much needed change of fortunes for Whitley as they finally ended their losing run with an impressive victory in their first ever game against Redcar Town.
However, the omens were far from good when during the warm up at Redcar’s Mo Mowlam Park, Whitley’s horrendous injury list was increased further when goalkeeper Adam Cameron broke a thumb, necessitating a last minute change with Preston Leech returning in goal.
The final score, a convincing 4-1 victory, obviously delighted the travelling Bay fans, and a very happy assistant manager Barry Rizza readily admitted “I don’t think we saw that coming!”
“Once again we’re down to the bare bones, a new signing coming in again tonight, a young 19 year old centre half (Jack Chapman) and I thought he was amazing. I thought every man on the pitch wearing the strip was amazing and gave it their all.
“But as we said, you just can’t write it, the goalie (Adam Cameron) gets a broken thumb in the warm up, but sometimes you get a bit of luck and sometimes you don’t and I just think once we start getting numbers back, we’ll be alright. But the four lads that have come in over the past week have been superb additions.
“I said to them all before the game ‘you make your own luck, we’re in the position we’re in and there’s no point feeling sorry for ourselves. There’s only one thing that’s going to get us out of that and it’s by hard work and getting the basics right and doing the hard work’ and I thought every man did that tonight.
“It’s trying to get our consistency and getting a squad together and getting a bit of consistency in areas of the pitch. I thought in every area we were good tonight but we just had that little bit of quality in the final third which we lacked for quite a number of weeks.”
Barry praised defender Alan Achuo, regularly a substitute, for coming off the bench, playing a more forward role and scoring his first goal for the club, which sealed the victory. “To be fair to Alan, he was fairly disheartened that he wasn’t starting tonight. He played on Saturday, but fair play, he came on in a different position tonight and he’s shown great attitude to do what he’s done and worked hard for the team!”
