Following his first game as Port Vale Manager last weekend, Neil Aspin is relishing the opportunity to get back on the training ground and prepare his squad for the Sky Bet League Two clash with Cheltenham Town.
The new boss only had a couple of days with his newly inherited team before the game against Grimsby Town last time out, but he admits that it will be ‘great’ to have a full week with them.
He said: “It will be nice to have a week with them and not to have a fixture in midweek. We have got a reserve game which means I can watch some of the players that I’ve not seen play - that will be helpful.
“You would like to have your eleven sorted and then prepare full every day, but that’s not going to be possible as it’s still early days - there are more players to look at these days, certainly than there was when I was playing.
“It would be wrong to discount people without having seen what they can do, but it would be nice to have a core of players so we can work on a structure that we feel is best for us as a team.”
With the Valiants getting off to a difficult start in Sky Bet League Two, Aspin admits the position doesn’t lie, but he is convinced that the players at the club have enough quality to start picking up results.
He said: “At the moment they deserve to be where they are because we’ve conceded too many goals and we haven’t scored enough.
“We have to stop shipping goals and find the net at the other end, the priority has to be what we do in both boxes.
“I thought on Saturday [against Grimsby] we started the game well, had a good tempo and we looked like we could score goals.
“In the second half we looked vulnerable, so we must do better in certain areas. We deserve to be where we are, but we can get out of it - it’s down to the players on the pitch.”