Neil Young has urged Marine not to let their defeat at Radcliffe derail their playoff ambitions.
The Mariners suffered at the hands of the runaway leaders in barbaric conditions last weekend. Owen Robinson had handed the visitors the lead inside 13 minutes but Bernard Morley and Anthony Johnson’s side fought back through Ewan Bange, Jordan Hulme and Willem Tomlinson.
Fin Sinclair-Smith offered a fightback to spark a nervy ending but Marine couldn’t claw back a point, leaving them fourth in the table – one point behind Hyde United and Warrington Rylands. Speaking prior to the top of the table clash, Young told Off The Park that their encounter with Boro would provide a marker for where they are as a squad.
Following on from that, the Mariners boss feels that they are still challengers. He said: “We have to move on because it’s about the next game, I took more positives than negatives out of the game – they’re probably going to be the champions and have really good players.
“I thought we more than matched them, we could’ve got something out of the game, from a barometer perspective, of where we’re at, it was good.
“I was disappointed with the result but not the performance, if we took our opportunities when they come and second-half when the pitch deteriorated it stopped us having a real good go.
“I think we’re a very good side, I’ve got experience of winning this league so I know what we need.
“Don’t get me wrong, I know we don’t have the resources of a number of clubs but we’ve got a good squad who want to work hard,” he added.
“We have to keep on going, don’t let Saturday detract us too much from our end goal because before that, we’d been on a real good run of results and on Saturday, it was good like it has been for a number of weeks so we have that consistency. We just have to maintain that.”
This weekend Marine host Bradford (Park Avenue). Danny Whitaker has led the strugglers to some impressive wins in recent weeks as they look to make a late surge to safety.
They’re just three points adrift in the bottom four as they have their eyes firmly fixed on leapfrogging Basford United to safety. Marine ran out 3-1 winners in the reverse fixture last month but Young believes their precarious position poses a greater threat.
He said: “They’ve had some good results recently, we only went there about seven or eight games ago and were quite convincing winners. They’ve picked up points since then, some great results, we’ve got to be well prepared, they play some lovely stuff but we won’t be taking them lightly, we’ll prepare the same because we know they’re a dangerous team.
“Every game is difficult, particularly at this stage, there’s still a lot of clubs fighting for playoffs or fighting to get out of relegation, you can see that in the results. They’re all dangerous, take any one of them lightly and you’ll be beaten – simple as that.”
