Telford v Leamington: Kevin Wilkin urges Bucks to get play-off place wrapped up
Kevin Wilkin has called for humility from his AFC Telford United side ahead of their crunch play-off clash with Leamington tomorrow afternoon.
The Bucks will secure a top-five finish with a win, or if Redditch United fail to win at fourth-placed Stratford Town.
And while on paper Telford look set for a shot at promotion in May, Wilkin wants to get things wrapped up as quickly as possible.
“The message always from me going into every game is that we need to be humble,” Wilkin asserted. “We haven’t finished our league campaign yet and we can’t get ahead of ourselves or worry about play-off campaigns yet.”
He added: “If we achieve another win we’ll certainly be in it, but as we say and as boring as it is, we’ll take it one game at a time. We’ve got four big league games to play in first and winning each and every one of those is my aim.
“I think at the moment we want to put some more points on the board. If we can’t finish second we definitely want to finish third and that’ll be a lot of the thinking going into Saturday.”
The two sides met back in October and battled out a 1-1 draw at the New Windmill Ground.
Byron Moore, who is expected to miss out on a starting spot due to injury this weekend, scored the opener that day, only for Telford to be denied the win by a controversial penalty decision.
And it is fair to say Wilkin has not forgotten about that result in a hurry.
“You look at (the reverse fixture) and we never felt like we were going to concede,” he explained. “It was a highly-dubious penalty, and to this day I maintain it shouldn’t have been a penalty, that was given against us, and we ended up losing out on two points.
“We were getting to a reasonable place ourselves at that stage and we’d scored early, were managing the game well and probably should’ve moved things away from Leamington before a refereeing decision came back to haunt us.”
Monday’s trip to Bromsgrove Sporting proved a tricky physical test for Wilkin’s side, and the Telford boss is expecting another battle this weekend.
“Having spoken to a couple of managers that have faced Leamington recently it sounds like they are quite direct and can play similar (to Bromsgrove),” he revealed. “With Tyrone Barnett and Jack Edwards they can be very attritional, but while they can be attritional they have that versatility and do have some good footballers in the group.”
He added: “You look at their league position, you have to have those strengths about you to be at the sharp end of the league.”
Club captain Fraser Kerr is expected to be fit enough to start despite being subbed off early on Monday afternoon. Sam Whittall and Ricardo Dinanga both stepped up their recoveries with substitute appearances at Bromsgrove, while Nathan Fox is in contention for a return against Long Eaton next weekend.
