United boss Keith Curle spoke to us ahead of this weekend’s return to League Two action as the Blues travel south to face Stevenage on Saturday afternoon.
“I think it’ll be a tight encounter,” he said. “It’ll be very similar to what they did when they came up here. They’ll try to box off the midfield and they’ll look to be competitive.
“I’d expect to see their wide midfield players playing narrow, so they can try to land on second balls and get dominance in that area.
“As ever, we’ll have to do things properly. They’ll look to dictate the pace so we’ll need to compete and make sure we protect and use the ball well when we have it.”
“Both teams have had the distraction of being in the cup, and both teams have fallen foul of Championship clubs having given good accounts of themselves,” he continued. “Like us they’re well placed for a push up the table and they aren’t an easy club to go and play.
“We’ve done ok when we’ve gone down there and we’ve managed to come away with some decent results, but we know we’ll only get that again if we’re competitive.”
Looking back to the meeting between the two sides earlier in the season, he said: “They got their goals at our place from a couple of errors, but other than that I thought there was nothing much in it.
“Goals always change games, but I think we saw that we can cause them some problems as well. We need to be clinical and ruthless at both ends.
“Stevenage have had a little blip, but they’re capable of picking up results. They’ll feel they could be up in the play-off places right now, and we feel exactly the same about ourselves. We want to be operating up there and pushing for automatic promotion.
“That comes from being consistent and from putting a run of results together. We’re as frustrated as anybody that we haven’t done that enough his season, but the qualities are there in the dressing to beat any team in this division.
“What we need to do is make sure we do the simple things repeatedly, over and over, and the results and performances will then take care of themselves.”
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