Gillingham assistant manager John Schofield writes exclusively for the KM Group
08:00, 14 February 2014
We all know what Sheffield United, our opponents on Wednesday, are capable of doing but we won’t be over-analysing them.
We will have someone at their FA Cup game against Nottingham Forest on Sunday but you can easily get blinded if you focus too much on opponents.
We attend a lot of the courses and one of the sayings that you hear is “over-analyse – paralyse.”
If you tend to over-analyse the opposition, you can paralyse your own players by thinking, ‘oh my God, they can do this and they can do that’.
It is about getting a happy medium between giving enough information about their strengths and weaknesses and giving them more than enough detail to say ‘this is how we can exploit them.’
We watched Sheffield United’s fantastic performance against Fulham in the FA Cup and know the way they will play. They are a massive club.
A few years ago they were in the Premier League and now they are in League 1. It will be a massive test.
We got a great result last Saturday in Carlisle and it rounded off a good weekend. We had a good couple of days training and travelled up on the train.
We had a few meetings, good conversations and what you can do on the train is a little bit of walking around and mix with everyone.
We have fantastic transport normally but to change it up was good and something different.
Full column in Friday's Medway Messenger