United’s pre-season fixture programme continues with an away trip to face Kendal on Wednesday night [kick-off 7.30pm], with the Friday game at Penrith proving to be a decent way to set things off.
“It’s a really good start to pre-season, and a good crowd hopefully helps Penrith,” assistant manager Gav Skelton said. “As we’ve already said, I thought Penrith performed well at times.
“They had a good shape about them, moved the ball well, and we found them difficult to break down. Probably the fitness levels and full-time aspect shone through at the end.
“It’s Kendal next and the lads will train hard up to it, train on the day of it, they’ve got another tough week next week.
“In terms of that, it will be the same preparation, double sessions, triple sessions and training in the morning.
“Hopefully we’ll see another decent amount of fans which, of course, will help Kendal as they head into their own season of games.”
“There’s a positive feel about the place at the moment and you hope you can keep that,” he added. “But you’ve got to keep performing well and working hard to maintain that feeling.
“There’s a lot of positive vibes and it’s up to us to try to win football matches. There’s nothing else like that to make the positivity grow.
“There is a really good vibe but we’re not silly, we know winning makes people feel even better. That’s football, it doesn’t change in terms of that.
“The group of players we have know that, and they’re buying into what we’re trying to do. Backing that up, as we saw at Penrith, we have the second-year youth lads as well.
“I thought they [Nic Bollado, Ryan Carr and Kai Nugent were excellent. Their enthusiasm, drive and hunger to play was really impressive.
“Without sounding soft, they did do really well, and it’s important because it’s in front of the manager.
“I think it showed with Jack Ellis last season. If you perform with that hunger and desire to run and wear the shirt, which they did, it puts them in good stead. I thought they performed really well.”
