Northampton Town: Hard work finally pays off for Boothroyd
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AIDY BOOTHROYD says Tuesday night’s win over AFC Wimbledon was the fruit of a two-week labour period in which the manager crammed a miniature pre-season campaign.
With two Saturday games falling by the wayside and the snow that caused those postponements preventing any training from taking place on grass, Boothroyd exchanged his role of football manager to one of a personal fitness trainer for his squad members.
Not too many of the players would have been doing cartwheels when presented with a schedule that included three sessions a day, with some of them being gruelling classes to ramp up their collective cardiovascular capacity.
But such gripes went out of the window at 10pm on Tuesday night as the final whistle went on a first win at Sixfields for almost five months.
Boothroyd successfully avoided the cliché about the season starting now but with his preferred team in place and an intensive period of preparation under their belts, there is a feeling that a new dawn has risen.
“It’s a new team, a new manager and I think it’s a new club,” he said. “I said to the lads before Tuesday that we’ve got an 18-game season now.
“We’ve had our little pre-season in the winter with the weather, and that allowed us to get together and work on a lot of things that we wouldn’t have been able to do if we’d had the games to contend with.
“We did classroom sessions, we’ve been in the gym, we’ve done cross-training, rowing, treadmills, track work, we’ve been in the pool, five-a-side, we’ve done everything.
“The lads have worked their socks off. We are growing as a team, we’ve just got to make sure we keep everyone fit.”
The manager is shrewd enough to not start talking about corners being turned but there were signs in the Wimbledon win that the curve has started to move in an upward direction once again.
“There are still lots of things I’m seeing that I don’t like but I think we will eventually be at a stage where we don’t want the season to end,” he said.
“We won’t be getting excited, I went away from the ground smiling the other night and it has been a while since that happened but I am looking forward to the next game.”
A lot of the spotlight on Tuesday night went on Clarke Carlisle and rightly so because – at risk of getting carried away - his performance at centre-half had elements of both Gabor Gyepes and Ian Sampson about it.
He is the organiser, the on-field man manager, the leader of men that this team has been crying out for all season, and credit has to go to Boothroyd for bringing him in, and to chairman David Cardoza for financing the signing.
So too that of Luke Guttridge, who was pretty handy in his first spell as a Cobbler and looks every inch the class act this time around, even if he does let his enthusiasm get the better of him sometimes, as Boothroyd explained.
“You have to put him (Luke) on a lead sometimes because he wants to cover every blade of grass but we want him to play central and dictate things,” he said.
“He told me when he signed that he would get goals and that the side wouldn’t go down with him in it and I think he’s right.”
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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