Following Saturday’s 2-0 loss to Barnet, Millington hinted that he would be thoroughly examining his starting lineup choices given the way Halifax lost, allowing two careless goals from set pieces.
The Town manager also stated that he wants to prevent history from happening again tomorrow night against an Ebbsfleet squad that is only two points and one spot above the relegation zone.
“Our goal is to win every game, and we must exert every effort to secure three points against Ebbsfleet,” Millington stated to the Sportsynergy
“After all of the effort we’ve put in to get here, it’s unacceptable to give up three points so easily, like we did on Saturday.
“It was very preventable and I’ve got some serious thinking to do to make sure we don’t put ourselves in that situation again where we end up chasing the game.”
Barnet’s two goals from restarts where both players lost their markers on Saturday gave them an unstoppable two goal advantage after fifteen minutes.
“It’s a youthful group of players and one thing we’re certain about is they are going to be learning in their time with us,” Millington said.
However, the group has also been clear that we cannot tolerate players making the same mistakes over and over again; they must grow from them and correct them.
“We’re going to expect them to do that but team selection will also be influenced by those players who we know are going to stick to task and do a very consistent job.”
If The Shaymen beat Ebbsfleet, it will put them beyond the reach of Southend and Oldham.
Additionally, because of their far superior goal differential over Aldershot—who would need to triumph at Gateshead the following night to keep Halifax all but guaranteed a play-off spot—they would just be one win away from securing a top seven finish.
“The league position is the league position – at the start of Saturday, if we’d done our job properly we should have been aspring to finish in fourth position in the league,” Millington stated.
“At this moment, the only thing we can control is how we go into Tuesday, and we want to make sure we go into it in the best possible way to get three points.
“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t gain nine points between now and the conclusion of the season if we perform to the best of our abilities.
“But it starts with us sacrificing everything and putting every bit of energy we’ve got as a team into the Ebbsfleet game.”
Despite the fact that so much is riding on their last games, Millington maintains that his team is not under any additional pressure at this point in the season.
“The pressure’s exactly the same as it was first game of the season against Bromley, we go out and the pressure is on for them to perform, do their jobs, be disciplined, be consistent and do everything they can to get three points for the club,” he stated.
“That pressure is exactly the same – it’ll be the same on Tuesday as it was on Saturday.”
Saturday’s game saw Town kick off a run of four games in eight days to end the season, with their home game against Oldham at Chesterfield’s ground on Thursday before a visit to Eastleigh on the final day next Saturday.
“In some ways it eases off because we aren’t going to be training, we’ll have basic match-prep sessions, there won’t be a whole lot to plan for in terms of training sessions because they’ll be very, very low intensity,” Millington said.
“We’ve got a lot of the opposition analysis done for Ebbsfleet and Oldham because we prepared a lot of work in preparation for the first games, so the pressure is eased a bit in that sense.
“It’s no unusual for us to play Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday so to add one more game into that is not ideal but it’s certainly not going to make the end goal any less achievable.”
