Notts County Manager Shaun Derry spoke to the media on Thursday to preview this weekend’s Sky Bet League 1 game away to Swindon Town.
After a much-deserved, although hard-fought, victory away to Colchester United in midweek, Derry admitted to a sense of relief, having ended a run of three straight defeats, albeit games in which Notts had enjoyed much the better of the action for long periods.
“Obviously, having lost the number of games that we have done lately, it’s not been nice coming in,” the Notts boss told the media on Thursday. “Everyone’s thinking that we’re playing well and then you’re not getting your rewards at the end of it, so yeah it is a sense of relief, it was a big win for us.
“I don’t think I can have any complaints in terms of the level of training, the level of training’s been fantastic all season, but we’re here to win, everyone wants to win football games and we take it personally when we’re not winning games, but like I say, short-term relief and we look forward to the weekend.”
Looking ahead to Saturday’s game, Derry hopes that his side can go into the game full of confidence after that win in midweek, but he’s expecting our opponents to be looking to bounce back from a disappointing 3-0 defeat at home to Gillingham on Tuesday evening.
“It will be a completely different challenge, it will be,” Derry explained. “I know they’ve had a number of defeats in recent times as well, but we knew, going into the Colchester game we needed to win, by hook or by crook we needed to get the three points and thankfully we’ve done that, so we go into the weekend’s game, again, high on confidence and hoping we can cause an upset.
“We’ll be going there with a game plan and hoping that we can cause that upset, but I think that, at the end of 95 minutes on Saturday, I want Swindon to realise that they’ve been in a game and we’ll sure try to give them that.
“Once you’ve lost 3-0 at home you want a reaction and Mark will be getting his team to try and create that on Saturday, so for me I’ve just got to make sure that we’re organised and we’ve got this game plan that we want to be taking into the game,” he added.
“This league throws up some strange and wonderful results, especially coming into the business end of the season, so hopefully we can be one of them teams on Saturday that come back with something on their travels.”
Subscribers can watch the full pre-match media session with Shaun Derry on Magpie Player.