Cobblers boss Sampson wants repeat of cup heroics
Ian Sampson is confident his Cobblers players can reproduce their Carling Cup heroics tomorrow – and secure their first league win of the season.
Town play host to Wycombe Wanderers at Sixfields this weekend buoyed by a shock win on penalties at Reading on Tuesday night in what was comfortably the team's finest performance of the campaign to date.
And their manager sees no reason why his team won't be able to play the way they played at the Madejski Stadium – because the Chairboys will let them have the ball, and pass it.
"I don't think it should be too difficult to reproduce our performance level," he said. "They set the standard in the two cup games and they have to keep to those standards.
"Wycombe will come here and try to play the game in the right way so that might give us an opportunity to pass the ball in the way that we like to do.
"Hopefully it will be a good game of football and I shouldn't have any problems raising the players after the game in midweek."
Although it was not the perfect performance and the Cobblers could easily have gone out of the cup at Reading, the side still played to a very high standard.
Sampson has played down the tactical change he made – opting for a 4-2-3-1 system instead of the 4-4-2 he has used in all of the team's previous games – and says the result was mainly down to certain members of the line-up paying more attention to their pre-match instructions.
"Certain people did what we've been asking them to do in training and they took on board what we've been saying to them," he said.
"They didn't try to be individuals, they played as a team and I thought we played pretty well. We've done pretty well in all our games to an extent this season, we've just obviously not got that first league win yet."
If they are to get off the mark tomorrow the Cobblers will have to do so at the expense of a Wycombe side who may actually pressure them more than the Royals did in midweek.
"I thought they (Reading) pressed with a real tempo and they made it really difficult for us," he said.
"So I was really pleased with how we handled the ball.
"Our touch was good, that's something that we work on a lot in training."
Read Jefferson Lake's full Wycombe preview in Friday's Chron...
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Friday 10 February 2012
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