Ahead of Saturday's home fixture to Morecambe, Luke Joyce has praised the squad harmony within this current Vale team, with a good mixture of both experience and youth.
It is known that Vale are not short of the experienced player. The likes of Joyce, Antony Kay, Tom Pope, Danny Pugh and Michael Tonge provide a wealth of professionalism to John Askey's side, though Joyce believes there has to be a mix of both experience and youth to make a team succesful.
With Dan Turner now available for selection alongside first-team regulars such as Mitch Clark and James Gibbons, Joyce believes the squad has found that balance.
He said: "Everyone's fighting for a shirt, be it lads who have been here for years - Popey the captain or lads who have come in on deadline day.
"Everyone's trying to help each other - whatever age you are everyone's trying to help each other. We've all got the same aim to win games and do as well as we can. If the more experienced lads can help the younger lads in anyway possible then, of course, we will do.
"But also, it's young lads having to tell someone a bit older if they're not doing their job. If they're not doing something right or they can do something a bit better, then they've got to tell them because everyone has to pull together."
Vale face a monstrous few weeks in Sky Bet League Two as they face a number of teams battling it out for survival, and the results against their fellow strugglers could define their season.
With clashes against the likes of Morecambe, Notts County and Cheltenham Town just around the corner, Joyce insists that Vale have the means to climb up the table and away from the drop zone.
He said: "We've got some good players. When we've done the debrief today, you could see we created numerous chances on Saturday; we could've had two or three goals in the first-half. Four of the last five goals we've conceded have been deflections.
"We can't use that as an excuse and there's only one way to put it right and that's hard graft and hard work. The big one is Saturday, we've got to look after that before we look at anything else.
"Morecambe are in a similar position to ourselves so it's going to be a big game, but there's still plenty of football to be played from now until the end of the season."