These notes are taken from our programme for the visit of 1874 Northwich. Buy on the gate for £2.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Brookburn Road for this afternoons league fixture against our friends from 1874 Northwich. We would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone connected to 1874 including Paul and Wayne whom I regard as friends in the game. Following their outstanding FA Vase run last year Northwich, like ourselves, have struggled at the start of this season to get points on the board. I’m certain however that they will turn this round sooner rather than later, I just hope it’s a little later than 5pm today!!

We have had a poor start to the season, compounded by unavailability and injury to key players! Whilst we accept that injuries are part of football, to be robbed of Zac Cooper, Jamie McLennan, Mark Rogers, Joe Shaw, Rory Breslin, Jack Langford, Ashley Leather and Tom Bailey has left us bemoaning our luck a little! Consequently, we’ve had to blood players perhaps a little earlier than we might have wanted to! The performances have not been as bad as the results have suggested, against Lower Breck and Padiham we created more than enough chances to win the games comfortably however we were not clinical enough and were punished by some naive defending. You don’t have to be a tactical genius to realise that we need to be more defensively solid as a team and we are working hard in training to get this right. Additionally, we will need to add to our squad, we have re-signed Ben Woods from today’s visitors and there may be one or two more that join the squad in the coming weeks.

Off the pitch you may have seen that we have advertised for a new assistant manager. It has always been the plan to strengthen our management team in light of Stephen Brockley and his partner Emma expecting a baby in early December.

On behalf of everyone at the club we congratulate them both and we look forward to welcoming ‘little Brockley’ to Brookburn Road in the near future. Our inconsistent start to the season has accelerated this process and we have received lots of interest at the time of writing these notes. We look forward to interviewing the interested parties in the coming weeks and we will hopefully have an announcement to make in the not too distant future! I think a fresh pair of eyes might allow us to evaluate the games and performances differently and hopefully we will see an improvement on the pitch. Adding to the freshening up behind the scenes is our new physio Suzanne. Suzanne has a wealth of experience and replaces Tyler who has taken up a full-time role which requires him to work Saturdays. We thank Tyler for his efforts and look forward to working with Suzanne moving forward. Already Suzanne has been thrown in at the deep end with our extensive injury list but I’m sure we will start to see some of the injured players back on the pitch soon.

Fingers crossed this renewed optimism about our direction will help us get the 3 points but we will be under no illusions that it will be an extremely tough game!

As always thanks for the support and enjoy the game! Come on West!

– Setts