Lawrence: "Home form is the key to success"

By CCFCSleepingGiant.com
August 13 2002

Lennie Lawrence has warned his players that tonight's match against Port Vale will be anything but easy. "Teams coming to Ninian Park will be fighting for their lives," he said.

City's away form under Lennie Lawrence has been far better than our home form. We drew eight league games at fortress Ninian last season while the heartbreaking play-off defeat against Stoke also occurred on home soil.

City are 7-4 red hot favourites to win the Division Two Championship, so Lennie Lawrence is expecting teams to come to Ninian Park and defend in numbers for 90 minutes.

"We are the Manchester United of the Second Division. We've got to be mentally prepared for that. Teams will be coming here and playing as if their lives depended on it," Lawrence told the Western Mail.

"They will be going away thinking they've won the cup if they take a point from us at Ninian Park. This is what we've been focusing on in the last two or three days.

"Last season we conceded too many sloppy goals at our place. After I took over as manager we fell behind in three games - against Queens Park Rangers, Blackpool and Notts County.

"The games we won at home were all close games. We never walloped anybody and that's what we've got to start doing."

City's brilliant away form last season saw them pick up 11 victories on their travels. Lawrence wants his team to reproduce that form in the Welsh capital.

"We've been pretty faultless in away games. We have walloped sides even though the final score might not reflect that. We've now got to bring that same mentality to the home matches," said Lawrence.

"I've got to make sure my players don't think it's easy just because it's a home game. We partly overcame that towards the end of last season but we still conceded some silly goals."

It certainly won't be easy tonight. Port Vale will be desperate to recover after their embarrassing weekend 4-1 defeat. City must do a professional job - the fans demand 9 points by 4:50pm on Saturday.

Around 10,000 tickets have already been sold. A crowd of about 15,000 is expected.