Picture courtesy of Mike Kunz.
Darren Sarll is enjoying the organisation and fitness levels of his Yeovil team so far this pre-season, although he admits having to fight his nature.
Tom Knowles scored a late winner for the Glovers in the tough test at Taunton on Tuesday, but the manager said he was happy with his side’s display.
“I really enjoy coming here. Last year we were useless when we came here, absolutely useless and it set the tone. We’re starting to see a little bit more of a pattern of our play now. I thought the offensive play was better than it has been the last two games.
“We’re trying to evolve and were trying to look at our mistakes. We look strong in our shape so far. The nice comparable is we looked strong in our shape against Forest Green and we looked strong in our shape tonight and we need to keep developing that.”
Sarll added that he’s having to adjust to this new mentality and fight his natural urge to push his team to attack. He said: “My natural character is ‘come on let’s go’, ‘let’s go and attack’, ‘let’s go and score another goal’. I have to fight really hard on the side line to curb that intent. We need to be very strong in our shape. This group can’t afford to be expansive. It has to be compact, because it’s athletic, so that we can access different parts of the pitch a little bit differently than last year,” Sarll said.
While Sarll is happy with the defensive shape, he’s asked for patience when it comes to the attacking style of his new look team.
“People need to give us time on the offensive stuff because until I’m absolutely 100% confident that were not going to be a bunch of wet lettuces, then we need to keep nailing off this defensive organisation. It was good tonight. We were very strong in our shape and so far there’s not those hairy moments that I saw every half last year,” said Sarll.
“The big thing for us is to always apply our strategy as much as we can and have that consistently to our approach to it mentally. We need to try and keep evolving our attacking play because its still not quite right. I think that wont come until early September. I don’t think we’ll have that fluidity in our performance until early September. People are still trying to find how to get Charlie Wakefield in and where we roll Reuben [Reid] in differently to Joe [Quigley]. The midfield two is not quite right yet – the balance in their attacking play. So there’s loads of little things we need to iron out. If I’m doing it on the training pitch it becomes very manufactured, if we can learn in game it becomes very real. I think they’re important things that we need to patient with.”
Read Ian’s thoughts on the match at Taunton here.