Altrincham FC manager Lee Sinnott gives us the inside track on the Robins’ progress this season in the Vanarama National League. Here’s his latest column for Altrincham Today.
It’s certainly been a busy week on and off the field.
Last Saturday, we finally managed to complete our FA Trophy 1st Round tie with Leamington. The team performance was very poor but a wonderful strike from Michael Rankine saw us home 2-1 in extra-time, setting up a really long trip to Sussex, on Tuesday, to take on Bognor Regis Town in the 2nd Round.
The game almost didn’t go ahead, as Bognor creatively overcame the problem of the pitch being frozen in parts by driving six cars onto the playing area and using the heat from the switched on vehicles to thaw out the affected areas.
It was a tight game that was still 0-0 with a quarter of an hour to go, but three goals in less than 10 minutes saw the home side through 2-1.To be fair to our opponents, the two goals that they scored were great finishes, but having equalised through James Lawrie, I was obviously disappointed to concede again within a few minutes.
In all my time in football, I can’t remember a longer trip… for a few of us, from leaving home to getting back took almost 24 hours!!
We would have loved to have progressed further in the Trophy but that’s gone now and we have 20 league games left to play. Having not played a home league game since November 21st and having fallen behind other teams in terms of games played, we have dropped into the bottom four and that position now needs redressing.
Within the last couple of weeks, we have brought in three players on loan… two wingers in Josh Ginnelly from Burnley and Dylan Mottley-Henry from Bradford City and a striker, Jonny Margetts, who signed from Tranmere Rovers yesterday.
It’s obvious to everyone that scoring goals has been a problem to us and hopefully these three lads will help solve that issue… Josh & Dylan made their debuts at Bognor and I was pleased with both of them, particularly considering the difficult pitch.
George Bowerman has not had much game time recently and has gone on loan to Telford for a month and Tom Marshall has signed dual registration forms with Stafford Rangers, as part of his recovery process from his broken leg suffered last August.
Today, we face a really tough assignment at Grimsby, who are flying at the moment. We beat them at our place in August and fought out two draws with them last season, so I am hoping that we can continue our good run against a team that is very likely to make the play-offs again this year.
