STANLEY manager John Coleman doesn’t care whether his side are still flying under the radar or targeted as ones to watch - he just wants them to climb the table.

The Reds were pushed into the national spotlight with their promotion near-miss last season, changing perceptions of the club.

That was one of Coleman’s aims when he returned for a second spell two years ago, but he insists whatever their rivals think about them, Accrington still need to rack up the wins.

He said: “Teams are trying to stop us and you can only take that as a compliment.

“But you can’t govern what other teams are going to do, you can only govern what you do yourself.

“Whether you’re there for everyone to see or whether you’re sneaking under the radar, it makes no difference.

“You’ve still got to apply yourself, and if you apply yourself to the best of your ability, and the players we’ve got are good enough, you can certainly go on a run of positive results.

“One or our objectives (when we came back) was to try to get away from the ‘little old Accrington’ mentality.

“With the advent of (owner) Andy Holt coming in and changing the infrastructure, it seems to have gone hand in hand.

“That has helped and it was definitely my aim to stop bleating about being ‘little Accrington’ and punching above your weight.

“I don’t subscribe to that. It doesn’t matter what your wages are - you get 11 players on the pitch and you try and beat the other team.”

Coleman will be desperate for three points at home today against Blackpool, after Cheltenham’s late equaliser last weekend and the injury-time double penalty fiasco at Cambridge.

And he knows his team - in 11th place going into this afternoon’s game - can’t let the sides above them open up any sort of gap.

He said: “We’ve thrown points away this season, but we can’t bleat about it.

“We’ve been lucky that other teams haven’t galloped away from us, but the points that we have thrown away I hope they don’t come back to haunt us like they did last year.

“We’ve got to try to get up as high as we can as quick as we can. Christmas is definitely a benchmark - you want to be within touching distance then.”