The pundits might already have Carlisle United relegated, but manager Paul Simpson believes it can motivate his players – again.
Talking to the club website Simpson said “It doesn’t affect me and if it affected the players we would have had it last year because I think we were one of the favourites to go down last year as well.
“That’s why I don’t waste my money on that sort of thing. It doesn’t really matter, if we don’t get enough points we’ll deserve to go down, but at the moment we’re still in a good position because we haven’t even started yet.
“Nobody knows what we’re going to do. We have a clear mind about what we want to do, we want to keep surprising people.
“We surprised everybody last year and we want to carry on with that. We won’t surprise ourselves, just everybody on the outside, and that’s the challenge for us again this season.
“Like I say, I don’t bother with it at all. I don’t care what other people think, it’s not my problem. They get paid money for giving an opinion.
“It’s always easy to do that, I’ve done it before, I’ve been a pundit on Sky and on the radio, it’s easy to sit there and cast opinions when there’s no stress and pressure to it. That’s fine, let them crack on.
“We just have to do our job. And listen, if come the end of the season we haven’t got enough points, they’re going to be right, and they’ll sit there and pat themselves on the back. But we’re going to do everything we possibly can to be successful this year.
“I don’t think the players will have any type of imposter syndrome because they know they’ve earned the right to be in League One. I think that’s really important because I don’t believe you get promotion by chance, you get promotion by being consistent and doing things well.
“I don’t care if anybody else thinks we deserve to or not, we absolutely deserved to go up and we’re now in League One. We have to make sure that we show in our performances that we deserve to stay there.
“The only way we’ll do that is by winning games and doing things properly. I don’t want people to enjoy coming here because that normally means they’ve gone away with something. I want it to be horrible to play against us this year and I want to be really effective in how we do it.”
The Blues start their new campaign at home to Fleetwood Town this afternoon.
