Tait will stand by his attacking principles
Jan 19 2010 by Neil Farrington, The Journal
MICK TAIT has warned rival Blue Square North clubs that Blyth Spartans will not be kicked out of their new-found stride between now and the end of the season.
Spartans boss Tait takes his men to Northwich Victoria tonight not expecting a war of attrition against a side committed to playing progressive football under much-respected manager Andy Preece.
However, the roughing up his team have received on a regular basis this season is a puzzling concern to Tait, who fears being denied the services of newly-returned defender Richard Pell tonight by an injury inflicted by a nasty challenge in Saturday’s 3-2 home win over Vauxhall Motors.
Aware of the irony of a famously uncompromising former player moaning about the physical side of football, Tait said: “I’m not going to go crying to anyone, but it’s interesting that we’ve been on the end of some quite harsh treatment from opposing teams this season.
“Why is that? Possibly because we play a lot of football on the ground and look to stick to our principles whenever we can.
“Richard (Pell) needed five stitches in his leg on Saturday after a tackle which was possibly worse than the one that got one of their lads sent off, so he’s struggling for Northwich.
“But the one thing we don’t do is change our approach. We have some creative players here and I don’t want to stop them from expressing themselves.”
One area where Tait does want his team to toughen up, though, is at the back, where sloppy defending ensured what should have been a comfortable win on Blyth’s return to league action after the big freeze became a heart-stopper.
“We’ve struggled all season to keep clean sheets,” admitted Tait. “I wouldn’t mind if teams were scoring great goals against us, but we are making it far too easy for them.
“That said, we were impressive going forward on Saturday considering we hadn’t played a league game for a month, and I’m expecting a very good game against a Northwich side who are better than their league position suggests and beat Eastwood Town – who are right up there in the table – on Saturday. We could have been forgiven for feeling a bit sorry for ourselves, because the break for the bad weather came just when we were playing well.
“But the lads bounced back well after a disappointing performance and result against Guiseley in the week.” One beneficiary of that cold snap, however, has been striker Robbie Dale, who scored on Saturday in only his second start after a two-month lay-off following knee surgery.
“Just when Robbie got fit, the break came, so by the time he actually started playing, he was not that different in terms of his condition to the other players,” added Tait. “Having him back gives us really good options going forward, which we saw on Saturday.”
