Our men’s under-18s head coach Arthur Brammer says that stepping up hard work at the training ground will be the key to bringing an end to a winless run of six games in Premier League South.
That run saw Brammer's team lose 5-0 to Crystal Palace on Saturday, but he hopes that it provides an opportunity to press the reset button.
“We’ve spoken with the boys about the processes of trying to do the right thing every day and on the whole we’ve done them. But when you have a result like we did against Palace, you want to know what you can do better and what can we get more out of – how can we work smarter and harder. Have the boys been using the analysis suite as much as they could have been? That sort of thing.
“We want to use this as a launch pad for the game next Wednesday [against Dover in the FA Youth Cup] and recognise the areas we still need to improve on. We competed well for a half, but we’ve got to be able to do that for two.
“We need to make sure that the quality and fighting desire we have in the first half is there in the second. Saturday was tough to take, but it drives us to want to improve.”
In term of what he wants to see day-to-day, Brammer says his players have the perfect opportunity to put things right in the coming week.
“I want to see higher levels of commitment in everything that they do. We’ve spoken about the intensity of training, that it has to match the level of the game or be higher. There is a real drive on making sure that every session is to a really high level.
“We’re going to be working closely with the under-21s this week and that means we’ve got to raise our level and try to be better than them. I don’t want to see anyone shrink away from the defeat at the weekend, we need to work harder together.”