Bradford Park Avenue will be seeking swift revenge as they host Stockport County tomorrow.
Avenue assistant manager Mark Hume feels he saw enough in the Boxing Day clash of the two former Football League clubs for his side to exploit. It was a heavy defeat for Avenue but the number two feels the 4-1 scoreline was slanted.
Hume said: “We saw things in the game at Stockport that we can work on. We struggled in the first half but that might have been me and the system I picked. I changed it at half-time and we improved.
“It was just one of those when they had a decent day and we had an off day. Our performance on Saturday (at North Ferriby United) was so far removed from that and we spoke about that in the dressing room afterwards.
“If the players take on board what we talked about and they bring that to this game, we should be okay.
“I felt we were a bit unfortunate to lose 4-1. The referee was overruled by the linesman for their penalty – which is something I have never seen in my time in the game – and we had a great chance to make it 2-2 but they broke to make it 3-1, so things did conspire against us.”
Following the heavy defeat at Edgeley Park, Avenue lost 2-1 at North Ferriby at the weekend and the back-to-back defeats have extended their losing run to five league games.
Avenue have now dropped out of the top half of the table and Stockport will have the added incentive of knowing they would overhaul their 13th-placed visitors if they were to win again to complete a quickfire double.
Hume said: “The only player we have missing is Richard Marshall, who is suspended, but we have Jordan Deacey back from his one-game ban for five bookings. There are no fresh injury concerns, so apart from Marshall we should be okay.
“Against Ferriby we went with a more familiar system from the start and looked better, so maybe that’s a pointer for me. It was dogged and we worked hard on the nitty gritty things that have to be done.
“We need to be playing a bit more fluent football and creating more chances. We can say lack of goals has cost us on this poor run but at the end of the day conceding goals has lost us those games.
“You can’t win games by giving cheep goals away. We need to keep clean sheets – and stop missing chances like we did at Stockport.”
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