MARK Cooper has told his jubilant Darlington stars to forget the FA Trophy and focus on storming the Blue Square Bet Premier play-off places.
And the Quakers boss is targeting at least nine wins from their remaining 12 league games.
Cooper’s men – who entertain Kettering Town tonight – overcame Gateshead at the weekend to reach the May 7 final at Wembley.
But “Saturday’s finished”, he said, as he implored his team to concentrate their efforts on going up.
Cooper said: “Now we’ve got to put all our attention on somehow trying to get into the play-offs.
“We think we’ve got to win nine or 10 games out of 12 but we’re on a good run, one defeat in 18.
“So we’ve got to keep going and make sure that we do things properly and professionally and win as many games as we can.
“I would love to be the Kettering manager in the changing room before playing us.
“He’ll be rubbing his hands together thinking that we’re still up in the clouds and won’t be able to raise it again.
“We’ve got to be more professional than that.
“It’s about being professional and putting in a good performance, because we’ve got two home games that we’ve got to win against Kettering and Altrincham.
“Saturday’s finished, out of the way.
“We’ll forget about that and concentrate on the 12 league games that we’ve got left.
“We’ve got options where we’ll be able to change the team, the lads who were cup-tied come back into it and we can put fresh legs in there.
“That’s why we’ve got a decent squad, we’ll probably need to use them in the run-in.”
Meanwhile, Cooper is close to welcoming back Paul Terry to the first-team reckoning.
The influential midfielder damaged knee ligaments earlier in the season but is nearing a return. And with so many games still to play, the Quakers boss knows his involvement could prove crucial. Cooper said: “We did try to get a friendly last week but couldn’t stage it at the stadium. He’s had a practice match against the youth team.
“He played 80 minutes and came through unscathed. He’s obviously going to be a yard or so short but he’s nearly there. He’ll have benefited from his time out.
“We’ve got it (Tuesday and Saturday games) just about all the way through to the end of the season now so he’s going to be a big plus for us.”
