Keith Curle ahead of the Dagenham trip
Manager Keith Curle spoke to us ahead of the trip to Dagenham at the weekend.
“Part and parcel of the job at Carlisle is putting in the miles,” he said. “It doesn’t affect me in any way and I quite enjoy the travelling. It gives you a lot of time to reflect and mull things over, but the journey does seem a lot quicker if you’ve won the game.
“The journeys back we’ve had recently have been long. Hopefully we’ll put that back so the trip on Saturday will be a breeze.”
“Dagenham are on a slide with their results at the moment but they’re fighting for their lives,” he insisted. “Things aren’t going their way and we all went to Southport to watch the FA Cup game.
“It was a cup upset but Dagenham had chances and the result could have been completely different. It’s a dangerous mindset to go into this weekend thinking we should beat them just because Southport did. I watched them during their warm up and the players had a good intensity and they can handle a football.
“I’m mindful of the fact they need a result - but so do we. We haven’t had the results we wanted but it’s all about the performance levels. If we keep that high results will change.”
“There is an air of confidence around the changing room at the moment,” he told us. “My job now is to remind the players why last Saturday was so pleasing. Even though it wasn’t a convincing win they got their reward for doing a job. Hopefully we’ll get the same at Dagenham.”
“Like I say, they have good qualities and I will pick a team I think will be able to compete,” he said. “If that means I make one or two changes to try to exploit their weaknesses, without damaging the framework of the team, then that’s what I’m paid to do. It’s all about getting three points.
“If we go there and think we can turn this into a game of football, and turn it into a pleasant afternoon, we can forget about it. We need to go there and make it a confrontation whereby we will be playing in their half. If we let them play they will cause us problems and I don’t want to see that happening.
“What we know is that if our attention to detail is right we’ll give ourselves the chance to get a result in our favour. It’s still very early in the season but it’s potentially a six-pointer. It can be a stepping stone for us to get into the pack in the middle of the division but it’s also an opportunity for them to keep us in contact at the bottom. It will be intense but there’s nothing for us to be scared of.
“I have a squad that now knows how to win football matches and there’s an aggressiveness which has been teased out of a lot of players, because it doesn’t come naturally, and they’re starting to use that to their advantage. We know we have a big job to do but we also know we’re more than capable of doing it.”
