By Brian Bennett
Ashington are taking time to adjust to life in the Pitching In Northern Premier League’s East Division.
After winning promotion via an inter step play off final against Glossop North End, the Colliers are now in their third season in the league and after narrowly escaping the drop back into the Ebac Northern League last season, the Wansbeck side are currently fourth from bottom and in the drop zone this term.
However Woodhorn Lane boss Nick Gray reckons that in all his 17 years of management, he has never known a league to be so congested: “It’s ironic that at the time of me saying this, we are in the bottom four – yet the team who are fifth top are only nine points ahead of us,” he commented, “I have never known a league table to be so tight and I hope no-one will take this the wrong way but I think the Ebac Northern League was stronger ten years ago (than this league). It’s quite an open but crazy league and shows that generally, every team has a run of indifferent results. Consett for instance started the season flying but they’ve had some challenging times over the last six weeks until they had a good result against Bradford Park Avenue. The league is wide open – there are two or three teams like Redcar Athletic, Matlock Town and Dunston but that apart, there is very little between the others.”
He continued: “For me, it’s about gaining confidence and being consistent. We’ve had a couple of false dawns but that’s what we are striving for at Ashington. We’ve had back to back wins and if we hadn’t got them, we could have been right in the mire. This month is important because we are playing teams around us so we need to get positive results in those games because what we don’t want is for those other sides to gain ground on us.”
Gray admitted that bringing new players to the club is not a straight forward scenario: “I have tried (to get players in) but we cannot compete financially with teams in our area and that’s being realistic,” he said, “We are where we are and we have a good group (of players) at the club who will fight tooth and nail and give everything and I’m confident we’ve got a squad who will get us away from the relegation zone.”
He went on: “Some players don’t want to do the travel and in addition they can usually get a better deal around the doors. Credit to the lads who play at this level because it’s certainly not for the financial side of things but for the love of the game and wanting to do well for the club.”