Thornbury Town manager Richard Joyce believes his side have what it takes to stay in the Uhlsport Hellenic League Premier despite 4-0 loss to Corsham Town.
After a disappointing defeat away at Corsham, Joyce, says his team shouldn’t be disheartened as his side were ultimately nine players down, Joyce revealed the absence of players is the reason behind the loss “it does affect things, with our resources in the league, up against a lot of teams we really need to be at our best, strength wise in terms of our squad.”
Joyce also went on to say how the congested fixture list has also had an effect on the players “Tuesday was the last consecutive week of Saturday, Tuesday so that’s asked a huge amount on the squad physically, we’ve picked up one or two injuries on top of the ones we already had.”
When asked about what he thought of his team’s performance Joyce had a little smile on his face while he said “we conceded goals at really key moments, we conceded a penalty after five minutes, against a team like Corsham you want to go in at half-time as close to 0-0 as possible, so to concede after five from at penalty obviously makes your life harder.”
Despite the result, Joyce remains optimistic stating “we’ve done a huge amount of good work to get ourselves into the position we are in now it could be a lot worse but we need to pick up points if we are to stay in the league.”
Life as Thornbury manager didn’t get to the best start for Joyce, winning just one of their first 10 games, but now things are very different, a good run of results in January and February for Thornbury now finds themselves in 16th.
The former Cheltenham Town head of media and communications credits the development of a playing identity as one of the key things into the revival of his sides season “we just found a way of playing, we found a little bit of confidence after that first win, we started getting some results, we started winning back-to-back so that was good for us as we essentially took six points in five or six days.”
But the aim for Joyce and his team is to firstly secure their safety in the Uhlsport Hellenic League Premier, then to start climbing the league table “its mixed (aims going forward) the main aim is clearly securing our spot in the division, but on the flip side if we get a few good results, the team last season finished 14th in the league and got 38 points, so if we can beat that then it will be a unbelievable achievement.
Thornbury’s next game is at home against Roman Class St George on Saturday, a win for the Thorns will see them climb up the table further into 15th place.
