Harry Pell made his return to action in a 2-0 defeat to Accrington Stanley last Saturday. The man mountain in midfield has been struggling to get playing time over the last few months due to bad form and injury, but he insists that the team must do more to battle for points when the going gets tough.
The 26-year-old came off the bench in the 67th minute for Taylor Moore and did have an affect on the game. In injury time Pell had an effort cleared off the line by ex-Aston Villa academy graduate Janoi Donacien. However, despite his best efforts they still failed to break through the Accrington defence and after suffering defeat, Pell is now adament his team must be more “dogged” in their peformances in order to start climbing the League Two table.
“Sometimes we do our analysis and your sitting there scratching your head wondering how we’ve dropped some massive points,”
“If we are going to look up rather than down then we need to iron mistakes out and we are desperately trying by doing some work on the pitch but for some reason we can’t find that consistency at the moment.”
Cheltenham are now in 16th place after 28 games, 11 points off the relegation zone and just 10 points off the playoff places. Despite the defecit between them and sixth being reachable, it seems that the Robins are struggling to find a rhythm this season.
“Really dogged performances are something that we have lacked when we are in a close battle, you get the goal and you sit in and take the win however it comes whether it looks horrible to watch.”
“We most definitely do need that now.”
“But to do that you need to be ahead in games and if Mo took that chance today then there would have been the opportunity to get to 75 minutes to use your experienced heads to pull the wide players in and shut up shop.
The captain certainly knows how important it is for his team to score first in order to have a better chance of winning, whenever they’ve broken the deadlock themselves in the 90 this season, they’ve gone on to win seven of those ten games.
The ex-Charlton Atheltic schoolboy is certainly asking for more bite from his players in the second half of the campaign, starting this Saturday away against Mansfield Town.
