Fuelled by confidence, consistency and solidarity FC Halifax Town’s play-off push continues to hit maximum speed.
Pipping Nuneaton Town to the spoils was followed by a resounding mauling of Barnet, two rivals eliminated from the play-off reckoning, as Paul Marshall prepares to lay siege on third place Grimsby Town to complete the daunting trio of three successive away matches:
“We knew going into the next three games against Nuneaton, Barnet and Grimsby that they were all going to be very tough. The aim was to win every game but we would have taken four points from Nuneaton and Barnet most definitely.”
The year 2014 marks nine wins, four draws and three defeats for the Shaymen, a momentous run of form that includes eight wins from the last ten Skrill Premier matches. Prevailing over Barnet in such comprehensive fashion, the North London outfit’s highest ever defeat at The Hive Stadium, signified the belief the team currently bears:
“Confidence is flying at the moment. Barnet are a very good team so we had to be right at it on Saturday to get the result and I think we were excellent from front-to-back and fully deserved the win.”
Seven clean sheets in the last eight outings underlines the steel and organisation of Neil Aspin’s troops as Marshall believes that the clean sheet record is a collective achievement:
“It is a mixture of everything to be honest the defence has been different class and at the same time in me, Lois Maynard and Matty Pearson we have all been doing well both defensively and offensively in midfield. We’ve also got our wingers like Scott McManus on Saturday who worked so hard going backwards and forwards and the same for Scott Spencer, I just feel as though we have a better team ethic than anything else.”
While the triumph over Grimsby at The Shay is heralded as one of the best home wins of the season, the same applies for the recent away win at Barnet, as Marshall, formerly of Aberdeen, believes that the latter is the most poignant of the two:
“Against Barnet we had a lot more pressure on us because we knew we needed to get the result and take any chances that could get us in the play-offs. The Grimsby game earlier on was obviously a great result but we didn’t really have any pressure going into that game so we had everything to play freely.”
Up until recently away victories have been in short supply, as eleven of FC Halifax’s twelve league losses have come on the road whereas only five of Town’s twenty victories have come away from Calderdale. However with form on an upward curve Marshall knows that the squad needed time to acclimatise to the fifth-tier of English football:
“The lads know the league better now than what they did earlier on in the season, they’ve adapted to the players they’ve been up against and I think we’re working a lot harder as a team now than what we did.”
After efficently navigating past a plucky Tamworth on the 1st March 2014, Halifax sat in 9th place below Grimsby who had five games in hand. Six weeks on, a win for Marshall and company could see The Mariners concede third place to FC Halifax on Tuesday night, a startling transformation that would fail to flabbergast Marshall:
“Football is crazy so these kind of things change quickly in football, I think that earlier on in the season we had a few blips and we thought that on that form we get mid-table. Even though we knew we had the players to progress because our home form was excellent we just needed to take our home form into away games, so that has been the difference really, I believe that we are three wins away from getting into the play-offs.”
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