Chelsea star and Newtonian ROSS TURNBULL writes an exclusive blog for Aycliffe Today…
Hi and welcome to my second blog for Aycliffe Today.
A lot has happened since my last blog a few weeks ago. After our win at QPR we went to Mallorca for some warm-weather training and the atmosphere there was good.
Results have been a bit hit-and-miss recently, but the spirit within the camp is still really strong and the lads are determined to turn things around.
Everyone has their part to play and we’re all working extremely hard in training. The competitiveness and tempo is as good as I’ve seen.
When you lose a game all you want to do is put it right, and that’s certainly no different with us.
We all hurt after a defeat – the players, management and staff – but we’re all desperate to make amends, especially for the fans.
The good thing is that we have some really big games coming up in the next week.
We play Birmingham at home in the fifth round of the FA Cup on Saturday lunchtime. The FA Cup is a competition all clubs want to win and we think we stand a strong chance of winning it this season – we certainly have the quality of players to do it – and everyone at the club knows how much it means.
We then head off to Italy on Monday for our Champions League last 16 first-leg tie at Napoli next Tuesday night, and return home to London straight after the game.
Obviously that’s a huge game for the club, but it’s a two-legged contest so we’ll look to get a result in Naples before bringing them back to Stamford Bridge on March 14.
Hopefully I’ll be talking about us being in the quarter-finals of both the FA Cup and Champions League in my next blog!
I always like to keep in touch with how my hometown team Newton Aycliffe are doing in the Northern League. Their last few games have been postponed so there hasn’t been a great deal to keep up-to-speed with recently!
I know my mate, the skipper Sean Tarling, has started to put the beef back on with the lack of games, so he’ll be hoping their game against Consett this weekend gets the nod!
Joking aside, they’re still in the middle of a decent run at the minute – I think it’s eight games unbeaten – so long may that continue.
Thanks for reading – and I look forward to penning my next blog very soon.
Ross