Blackburn Rovers victory can give us real boost, says Accrington Stanley defender (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Blackburn Rovers victory can give us real boost, says Accrington Stanley defender

1:00pm Monday 23rd July 2012 in News By Chris Flanagan, Sports reporter

MICHAEL Liddle believes Accrington Stanley can take real confidence from their 1-0 victory over Blackburn Rovers on Saturday.

The left back returned to Stanley on a permanent basis last week, following a loan spell from Sunderland last season, and felt the Reds could be encouraged by the result and the performance against Rovers.

“It was a great result,” Liddle said.

“We knew we would be playing against a good team, but we had a good game plan and came out and tried to worry about our performance instead of theirs.

“We have been trying hard this last week to work on how we play football and how we want to do things.

“We’ve been working on how we wanted to play with a strong shape and we executed it well.

“We got out there, the pitch was beautiful, we tried to get it down and pass it and just play how we wanted to play and I think we did it really well.

“It will give us massive confidence.

“It shows that we can do it, we can play against the likes of David Dunn, some brilliant players, and we got it and passed it just as well as they did.

“It proves to us that we can do it and take it into our league games when they come, and do it against any team.”

The Reds are preparing for Paul Cook’s first full campaign in charge and Liddle believes that the squad will really benefit from a pre-season working with the man who took over from John Coleman as boss midway through last term.

Cook has already brought in a number of new faces for the new season but the core of last term’s squad remains, in contrast to some previous campaigns when Stanley were forced to change much of their team during the summer.

The Reds lost six of their first team a year ago.

“There’s a large group of lads here from last season when I was here,” Liddle said.

“It’s easy when you’ve got a big group and you know what you’re doing together and you’re moving forward as a team.

“It’s easier to bring new lads into what you’re trying to do. We’ve got a good solid squad and anyone coming in is going to hopefully make it stronger.”

Comments are closed on this article.