Boss Kieran McKenna says adding more penetration to his side’s game has been a continual theme of training from the time he took over Town.

While the Blues have kept clean sheets in six of McKenna’s nine games in charge, aside from the 4-0 victory over Gillingham, goals haven’t always flowed and he says improving that has been a major focus of work at Playford Road.

“I think the majority of our training weeks in general, to be honest, is always working on our in-possession game,” he said.

“I’ve said before, a big part of our clean sheets comes from our use of the ball, from the way that we’re dominating possession in games and dominating territory in games and managing to keep the ball away from our goal and not give away too many set plays and keep the game under control and not allow it to be come a chaotic game.

“We’re continuing to work on that as a team because we know that the better we are in terms of possession, the less chance the other team have to score goals.

“For us it’s been a continual theme to keep adding more penetration to our game, more goal threat.

“We’ve scored a fair few goals in certain games but other games have been quite tight and we’ve had some 0-0s and 1-0s, so we want to keep adding threat, we want to keep adding penetration to our games, we want to keep getting people in dangerous areas, getting more people beyond their defence and more players in the box.

“That’s something that we’ve been working on from day one, but has been a big emphasis this week as well.”

McKenna has repeatedly shuffled his front players throughout his time with the Blues. Is he looking for someone to put in the sort of performances which make them undroppable?

“We have rotated and it’s good to have those options and we’ve wanted to have a look at different players and different partnerships over the first period of games,” he said.

“But there is also a case of for the forward players that if you’re producing in terms of your goals and your assists, then you’re much harder to leave out of the team.

“I think that’s an opportunity for all of them. I feel like we’ve now been able to have a good look at all of our forward players in matches, apart from Kyle Edwards, who has picked up the injury, so I think that opportunity is there for them to go and really put their hand up and make a real claim for more minutes.

“When our squad is so strong minutes have to be earned, we won’t rotate for the sake of rotation, they have to be earned by training performances first and foremost and then they have to be earned by performances on matchdays.

“I think we are getting to a stage where when people are putting really top performances, it’s going to be even harder to leave them out. I think that’s a good challenge and a good competition to have in every position on the squad.”

Photo: TWTD

MickMillsTash added 16:01 - Feb 18 Have Burton been able to travel to Ipswich in 80mph winds ? is the game going ahead ? I've got a 3 hour journey tomorrow and would prefer not to get up early only for ITFC to realise that there is no opposition or roof on Churchmans
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Bazza8564 added 16:13 - Feb 18 The lack of goals recently has been a bit of a worry, BUT the club simply had to build a more reliable defensive system and we have been successful doing that. Lets hope that continues and that we click up top in a slightly more consistent way
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SitfcB added 23:34 - Feb 18 MickMillsTash it was a bit of wind not the apocalypse.
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