Gunning for glory on three fronts

Latics’ assistant manager writes every week for Chron Sport
THERE are a variety of carrots dangling in front of our players' noses at the moment.

As well as the prospect of moving up the table after Bournemouth tomorrow, we have the two cup ties coming up. There is clearly a lot to play for in the next couple of weeks.

Looking first at the FA Cup second-round tie we have, Southend are on a good run and will provide us with a very difficult task. Roots Hall is not the most inviting of places to go to play football and it will be a shock to the system for some of our players.

They will have to cope with plenty — the atmosphere, the hostility and the sort of game Southend will chuck at us — really quickly. It won't be pretty. It is one of those games in which we will need to stand tall, right from the off.

Three days later, we have another absolutely massive game at home against Bradford in the area semi-final of the Johnstone's Paint Trophy. You only have to look at the fixture on paper: it speaks for itself. A semi-final, with Wembley only a couple of wins away. It is huge.

With the momentum we have built recently, we have to do our best to keep certain players here at the club. It is fair to say it won't be easy going. Knowing the manager, he will be working his little socks off to try to make things happen.

I believe most of the players who are here on loan are happy and don't want to go back to their parent clubs. They are really enjoying it here, amid a good atmosphere. If it came down to those players themselves, it would be a foregone conclusion that they will stay. Unfortunately, it doesn't always end up that way.

On the field, at present it almost looks as if we are going out gung-ho to try to score one more goal than the opposition. That will only work for so long, though. It isn't what we are aiming for — it just seems to be happening that way.

We are desperately trying to keep a clean sheet and need to carry what we do on the training ground into match day.

Going forward, we continue to pose a threat. However, there were again some defensive frailties in evidence against Chesterfield last week. We just keep on plugging away and hopefully the penny will drop for some of them.

Once or twice Alex Cisak did really well for us, pulling off some smart saves. And it was a pretty good performance overall. On the whole, our two centre-halves Jean-Yves Mvoto and Zander Diamond did well, because Chesterfield really were a handful up front.

Tomorrow we face Bournemouth, a team that likes to play football - but also one whose form is a little bit up-and-down at the moment. They won last week at Wycombe but then lost their FA Cup replay at Gillingham on Tuesday, which illustrates the point.

It will be a difficult game. We are away from home and it is a difficult trip. The important thing is that we prepare correctly, make sure the players are informed about where Bournemouth's strengths lie and go out to execute our game plan the best we can.