Another late header from Clint Dempsey hauled us level in a pulsating Cup replay with Swansea on Tuesday, but encouragingly the American’s not satisfied with just reaching the quarter finals.
It’s important to go as far as you can in the Cup. Since I’ve been here we haven’t done well in either Cup competition so to advance and go as far as we’ve gone this season is great. We’re looking forward to the next game.
We created a lot of chances for ourselves and we showed we can come back from being down. You just have to keep working hard when things are not going right for you. All you can do is give your best and that’s what we did on Tuesday night. I thought we put in another good performance and to be fair we could have had a few more.
Dempsey knows we’ll have to raise our game when we take on United but is confident that we can put up a better showing that we did in our most recent meeting with the league champions. It’s clear he’s got a healthy regard for the Cup, whose image has taken a bit of battering over the last decade as many top-flight clubs concentrate on preserving their Premiership millions.
The FA Cup has so much tradition and it’s great to be a part of it and it’s something we have a chance to win. We’re not going to win the league so we’ve got to think that we can get something out of it. Portsmouth did it last season and won so why can’t we do it. We’re thinking along those lines but we know we have to take it one game at a time. We have our work cut out playing United.
Turning his attention to our forthcoming league trip to Arsenal, Dempsey’s ambition to go to the Emirates and take the game to Arsene Wenger’s side is pleasing. It also seems the side will be motivated by their failure to match United at Old Trafford.
Going to United and not performing well left a bad taste and we knew we needed to get back to the basics and we showed that against West Brom and Swansea. We need to be a team that can do it away from home and we’ll continue to work hard to correct that.
It’ll definitely be a tough game but we’ll give them a good game and the last time we played them at home we won. We have to go there being positive and try and get forward and score goals. We’re trying to do everything we can to stay in the top ten and push on from there.
