By Brian Bennett
“I’VE GOT A REVISED FIGURE IN MY HEAD – ONLY I’M NOT GOING TO DIVULGE WHAT IT IS!”
Ashington FC’s on-loan striker Connor Thomson has set himself a new goals target – only he’s keeping the figure a closely guarded secret!
Thomson – who celebrated his 28th birthday last month – linked up with the Colliers in mid October from Morpeth Town but last week the two clubs agreed to extend his loan until the end of the season.
The hotshot forward netted the winner in Ashington’s 3-2 victory over Consett on Saturday – which was his 16th goal of the campaign and he said afterwards: “I’m absolutely buzzing. When I first came to the club, I wanted to score goals and get assists and I’m delighted with both aspects. I initially set myself a target of ten (goals) and I’ve exceeded that so I’ve got a revised figure in my head – only I’m not going to divulge what it is!”
Newcastle-born Thomson described his goal on Saturday – which brought Ashington their first win at the Belle View Stadium in eight years: “Darren Lough gave me the ball and I took a touch inside,” he said, “I just wanted to hit it (the ball) as hard as I could towards goal and luckily enough it struck someone’s foot and lobbed over the ‘keeper and dropped into the back of the net. Yes it got a deflection but I’ll take it – and with five minutes remaining, it was a great time to score. We needed those three points as well so it proved to be massive.”
Ashington boss Ian Skinner has challenged his players to go through until the end of the season unbeaten and Thomson is hoping they can not only do that but find some consistency: “When I came to the club in October, we got some real good momentum going but then we hit a bit of an off patch where we lost a bit of form,” he added, “We seemed to get our form back and then it dropped off again which is similar to a lot of teams in this league where you can’t seem to find a good routine. However, if we keep pushing and believing in ourselves then I reckon we should be fine for the rest of the season.”
Manager Skinner added: “We are delighted to extend Connor’s loan. He has now scored 16 goals for us and that speaks for itself.”