Keeper Dan Hanford on his return to action on Tuesday
University of Cumbria student Jak Harris spoke to keeper Dan Hanford following his appearance at St Bede’s Primary School as part of the club’s ongoing community projects.
And he was joined at St Bede’s by David Amoo and the lads were put through their paces during Q&A sessions with the pupils.
“There were quite a few good questions today” Hanford said. “There were a few that had me and David [Amoo] a little bit stumped at how to answer them.
“It’s very important for the players to give back to the community, in my opinion. These schools are going to be coming down to watch us, so it's important for us to give out a positive attitude and let them see that we're just normal blokes.”
Hanford returned to the first team and kept a clean sheet during Tuesday night’s 1-0 win over Cheltenham Town.
“It was really important for me to get back into the side," he told us. "As soon as I was dropped I just wanted to get back and involved. Hopefully the manager has seen that and all I can do is keep taking the chances when they come along.”
On the arrival of on-loan goalkeeper Raphael Spiegel, he said: “I knew there'd be a keeper coming in and that's fine, because competition is good for all of us. The manager was very honest and up front about his selection and that's all you can ask for.
"I was determined then to work hard and I'm obviously pleased I got my chance again. I felt the game went well overall on Tuesday. I was confident with everything and the incident where I spilled the ball was to do with the wind and the collision with Kyle [Dempsey].
"The clean sheet was huge for all of us because we always back ourselves to get a goal. We can all take confidence from the result and hopefully push on from here.”
Looking ahead to the weekend, he said: “It’ll be physical from us. We’re a side with something to fight for as well as a point to prove. We want to be sitting comfortably by the time we get down to the last couple of games of the season.
“Exeter are a good passing side but we showed we can go toe-to-toe with them when we played them down at their place. It was only a lack of concentration that cost us in that game.
"I think the way we're now going about training and games means we’ll have no problems as long as we're positive in what we're trying to do. We need to make it a case of Exeter having to deal with us, and not us dealing with them.”
