Micky giving nothing away
The League Two season kicks in tomorrow afternoon and Vale kick in with a home fixture, with Barnet the visitors to Vale Park (kick off 3.00pm)
Manager Micky Adams is giving nothing away as he prepares for the game, but says everybody is ready and champing at the bit on the eve of the big kick off.
He said: “You always look forward to the first game of the season. Everybody is full of optimism and everybody seems in decent spirits, so we are all ready for it.
“It has been a slow, steady build up. We have had an extended pre-season really – we’ve done probably six and a half weeks – which is longer than you would normally have.
“But there were a lot of positives to come out of the game on Tuesday night and I think the one positive was that they looked really sharp and ready for it.
“When you look at the quality of players Burnley had on Tuesday, with the greatest respect to Barnet, their standard of play is not the same, but as we saw, if you don’t defend properly then you get punished and I expect that to be the same with Barnet.
Some people have already written Barnet off after they avoided dropping out of the league very late on in the last two seasons, but the Vale manager has warned that they may be a different proposition this time.
“They have go players that can hurt you. They played at Birmingham on Tuesday night and acquitted themselves very well.
“They have a new manager, nearly half a new team, so they will want to start well. I think the important thing is that we concentrate on ourselves and make sure we are right.
“The first League games of the season throw up some results that you don’t expect and Barnet came to us last season when everybody expected us to beat them and they beat us.
“Since then they have changed their manager. They want to change their philosophy of what they do and the way they play, so we are expecting a tough game.
“Certainly if we give them time and space they will enjoy coming here, like they did last season and we can’t afford to do that.”