Danny Clifton has told his Holbeach United side to put last week’s 6-1 drubbing at Debenham behind them – but has admitted that they need to be more aggressive.
The Tigers welcome back four key players for Saturday’s Thurlow Nunn Division One North clash against AFC Sudbury Reserves at Carter’s Park (3pm).
Cal Davies, Luke Nicholson and twins Harvey and Finlay Henderson all return after missing Holbeach’s first defeat of the season, but Clifton knows that alone won’t be good enough for his team.
Indeed, the joint boss knows that he can’t read too much into the Tigers’ opening day victory over Needham Market U23s after seeing them thrashed 7-0 by Norwich CBS on Saturday.
“I don’t think we were able to prepare for the Debenham game very well,” said Clifton. “Player unavailability got out of hand and we hadn’t planned to put in a more defensive and compact display.
“There were a lot of silly mistakes that made the scoreline a bit worse than it should have been, but we also weren’t aggressive enough on the day.
“By that, I don’t mean aggressive as in being horrible. I mean that we didn’t get high enough up the pitch and make ourselves harder to beat.
“I think we’ll look to start out that way against Sudbury, it’s certainly something we worked on a lot over pre-season.
“What I will say is that we perhaps need to re-evaluate our win against Needham Market. They lost 7-0 on Saturday, so we have to accept that it puts our win against them into perspective.
“It’s great that we’ve got a few players back and we’ll look to put Debenham behind us and get back to what we were doing in pre-season.”
Saturday’s opponents Sudbury have only played one game so far, losing 3-1 against Norwich CBS on the opening day.
Holbeach are also in action on Tuesday night, as they make the short trip to FC Parson Drove (7.45pm).
In terms of distance, it’s the closest fixture the Tigers have to a derby match this season.
Meanwhile, Holbeach have been drawn away at Winterton in the first round of the Lincs FA Senior Trophy.
