Notts County Manager Shaun Derry spoke to the media on Thursday to preview our Sky Bet League 1 game away to Oldham Athletic this weekend.
The Notts boss guided his side to safety in League 1 with a dramatic final day draw at Oldham last season but he knows it will be a different occasion this time around as his much-improved side make the trip up to SportsDirect.com Park.
He told the assembled journalists: “It’s been a remarkable turnaround in the type of people that we’ve got in the building. We go back there obviously fresh in our mind just what a fantastic day that was.
“But it’s a different football club now and it’s a football club that wants to progress and we’re not just looking at a 90 minute game where it was kind of all or nothing and that’s what it was last May.
“We want to progress, we want to get into the top six if we can, that’s everyone’s ambition and when you’re in and around the spaces that we are, like I’ve said I think there’s four or five standout teams in our division and there’s probably eight or nine other teams who can all look at each other and say well it’s one out of eight or nine and I’m hoping that we’re one of them,” he added.
“I think Oldham are in and around it and if you were speak to Lee Johnson he’d probably be saying the same as what I am. It was a missed opportunity last week and it was a disappointment but there’s 46 games in this league, you’re going to get a lot of disappointments along the way and it’s how you react.
“At certain times we’ve reacted quite well and I’m hoping that’s going to be the case again this weekend, but once again we’re going to have to be right on top of our game, because if we’re not, the two or three, four times that we’ve perhaps we’ve been off colour, we’ve not got anything out of the game, so that’s the message that I’ve said to the lads throughout the week that we’ve always, always got to be at the top of our game.”
Subscribers can watch the pre-match media session with Shaun Derry in full on Magpie Player.