Page 6 - 360633 LP236168 A Love Supreme 48pp A5 (April 2022)

BENNO & BARNSEY’S
PLAY OFF RUN IN
With just seven games to go of the League One season, we caught up with BBC Radio New- castle duo (and Roker End Café regulars) Nick Barnes and Gary Bennett in order to preview our remaining fixtures. These are the games which our season hinges upon and over a cup of coffee, we had our promotion doubts assuaged by Barnsey and Benno. Well, just a little bit...
GILLINGHAM
BARNES
My fear is that Gillingham will be like Crewe and Fleetwood, in that they’ll sit behind the ball and try
to make life difficult for Sunderland at the Stadium
of Light. Crucially, it’s a case of Sunderland doing what they did in both those games basically, which
is to grind out the result. I think Pritchard will be back and Broadhead will be too, which gives Alex Neil more options in attack. My gut feeling is they’ll beat Gillingham. We’ll take it one game at a time, because the landscape’s going to change every weekend. Psychologically I feel it’s quite important to stay in the play-offs rather than being one of the teams that are chasing it. Gut feeling: it won’t be pretty, but they’ll beat Gillingham.
BENNO
I think that with the remaining games that we have, we’ve got eight cup finals, they’re going to be difficult.
I think we need to be brave and what I mean by that is we need to be more attacking minded, more creative. We’ve seen at Lincoln the only thing we missed was putting the ball in the back of the net. Defensively, we looked sound; going forward, we were a threat. You’ve got to look at the likes of Jack Clarke and Patrick Roberts who we’ve said before, can win you games, but also they can frustrate you as well. Patrick Roberts, in the form that he was, everything he did was threatening. Everything came off, his little flicks, his positivity on the ball, he was going past players like they weren’t there, in the end they had to kick him! That was the only way they were going to stop him. That game there was an end product from him, but we just couldn’t score. We must go with this frame of mind into the Gillingham game, we have enough players to create opportunities.
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