STEVE KITTRICK: Luke really impressing in midfield

I don’t think many people realised just how vicious that wind was on Tuesday night.

We said to the players to make sure they were in it at half-time, knowing that when we turned round we’d have the quality to go on and win the game.

The horrible weather made the crowd of 1,082 even more impressive.

To get that many people coming along to a County Cup game on a horrible night is just fantastic and it means so much to everyone at the club to be getting that level of support from the terraces.

It would be great if we could stick another 400 or so on top of that for what is a huge game for us against Prescot Cables on Saturday afternoon.

It’s a big weekend for the sides chasing promotion, so we need to make sure that we don’t lose the game.

While we go out to win every game, it’s critical that we don’t come away empty-handed from the games against our rivals.

Tadcaster Albion did us a favour and held South Shields on Tuesday night, and things don’t seem to be going their way now.

That’s football though, you have to accept that.

We are expecting Bailey Gooda to be back in contention for Saturday after missing out on Tuesday.

Looking back at Tuesday’s performance, I thought we showed a real resilience, particularly in the first half when they had the wind at their backs.

We obviously came back into it in the second half and really should’ve scored two or three more, their keeper made some good saves to keep them in it.

They threw everything at us at the end to try and nick an equaliser, but we stood firm.

It was the right result in the end, we deserved to win the game and we’ll now look forward to the semis.

However, our main priority is undoubtedly promotion and we mustn’t get away from that.

I thought Luke Dean was fantastic again on Tuesday.

We took him out of the side a while ago and had a chat with him about it, and he’s really responded since then.

Young Jack Johnson also impressed me. It is hard to remember he is only 18 sometimes.