Paul Simpson believes Carlisle United face a tough opener tomorrow at Gillingham, who will be starting under new management.
Simpson has been talking to the official United website about the first League Two game of 2024/25 – and it won’t be easy.
He said: “I think they’ve recruited well, I thought they recruited well in January. It’s always a tough place to go. We know it’s going to be a difficult game, especially that first game of the season, where you don’t really know what to expect.
“I think that’s the difficulty, because there’s been a lot of changes going on at a lot of clubs, you just don’t know what to expect.
“But we do have some sort of idea. I think they’ve had about six or seven pre-season games where they’ve made a lot of changes in them, but the last couple have been fairly settled. They’ve picked up a few injuries, like we have, so we don’t really know who’s going to be fit and who’s not, or who’s going to be fully fit to start.
“We’re just going to have to wait and see. We’ll prepare as we think is the right way to go about it, we’ll show the players what we think the opposition are going to do, but come Saturday afternoon it might be totally different and we’ve got to be able to adapt.”
But who doe Simmo expect to be forcing the pace in League Two this season?
He said: “Who do you expect to be up there? I haven’t got a clue, and there’s always surprises every season. All we’ve got to do is make sure we focus on us, make sure we’re right, and hope that we are up there.”
Earlier in the week Carlisle had sold 450 tickets for the trip, a figure that was applauded by Simpson.
“You look at everything that’s gone on over the summer in terms of the number of season ticket sales which are up, you look at the shirt sales out of the shop, the shop takings is massively up, the fact that all hospitality is selling out for games, there’s a real buzz about the place.
“Now, what we have to do is, if it’s over 400 coming to Gillingham on Saturday, we have to make sure we get the performance right and then we have to take it into the next game and we’ve got to make sure we do everything we can to keep the feeling here, to keep the positive feeling.
“I’m selling the club to any potential signings on the fact that if we’re going well, we’ll be getting double figures in Brunton Park this season and that’s what we’ve got to aim for.”
