Mansfield Town manager Adam Murray says he wants to progress the club to a point where they are a constant threat in Sky Bet League Two.
After seeing his side come back from 1-0 down to win 2-1 against Morecambe on Tuesday night, Murray and his staff are now planning for another long away trip on Saturday, this time to Sussex to face Crawley Town.
Following a statement from chairman John Radford outlining how pleased he is with the progress made by the squad, Murray says he wants the club to become a force to be reckoned with under his stewardship.
“What I want to do here is build something where year-after-year we compete and we stabilise ourselves as a Football League club because you’ve got to understand that we spent a lot of time out of the League [and] with all due respect to the Conference, I don’t want to go to some of those non-league grounds again.
“We’ve got to make sure that the club’s in a healthy position, which it is off the pitch, then grow and build from that. The aim is to be a consistent threat to this league, then above that. The biggest message that it (the statement) sent out, for me, is a reality of who we are at the minute.
“We’re probably over-achieving at the minute with where we are and I had to make sure I got my side of that message across. That’s not a ‘down-tools’, we’re not happy with mediocre – if we can get in the play-offs then we’re going to try and get in them.
“Everyone who’s got any emotion towards Mansfield Town, they owe everything to John [Radford] because without him, there probably wouldn’t be a club at the minute.”
Tuesday night’s trip to Morecambe saw the gaffer set up his side in a different system to what Stags’ fans are used to seeing, but Murray says that the visit to Crawley will provide his team with different hurdles to overcome.
“We know their strengths. Obviously it’s another long trip for us – another three/three-and-a-half hours down there, but we’re going down there in good spirits. There’ll be a new game plan which goes in place.
“We’re in a situation now where we’ve said as a group: we want to finish as high as we can in the league – that’s the ambition, not the expectation, which is very important for us as a football club.
Murray continued: “We don’t want to pay too much attention to the league position because for what we’re doing this season, it gets in the way. We’ll try and win as many games as we can."
In team news, Murray revealed that left-back Malvind Benning is closer to a return, after playing in a behind-closed-doors friendly yesterday.
“We had a game organised for Mal yesterday, which was called off, so we put together an in-house game for him and some of the boys who needed some minutes in their legs.
“It went really well and he came through it as we expected, so he’s put himself back in the picture now. Obviously he’s lacking minutes, but he’s only going to get that with games, so that is a huge boost for us. It’s a massive boost for the group, a big boost for Mal and a big boost for the supporters.”
