Newport County Assistant Manager Joe Dunne says that the Exiles must take ‘it game-by-game’ as they prepare to face his former club Colchester United on Good Friday (3pm).
After a playing career that saw him represent Gillingham, Colchester and Dover Athletic, Dunne joined the staff at the U's following his retirement in 2003.
Joe was part of the furniture at the Essex club, taking up multiple roles in the club’s coaching staff up until 2012 when he was made manager of the club.
In his two full seasons in charge, Dunne led Colchester to League One safety with 20th and 16th-placed finishes before moving onto Cambridge as assistant manager under Shaun Derry.
And the Exile's assistant boss is looking forward to returning to familiar territory tomorrow afternoon.
“It’s still my hometown club who I represented for a number of years. I was a player coach, a youth development coach then all the way up to manager,” began Dunne.
“It’s always nice to go back there and see people who I still have a lot of respect for. It’s always nice to catch up with some old faces, but from a competative point of view, it’s another game and one that we’re trying to win.
“Most of our focus is on ourselves but of course in the week building up to any game, strategy has to be taken into account. Sometimes you’ve got to look closer at the opposition, their systems, formations and how they play and the impact their new managerial team has had.
“We have a strict game-by-game process and we’re only as good as the next game. We have to take it game by game and it’s as simply as that. All we see is Friday and Colchester United. We’ll be putting everything we can into that to get a result before we can even think about the next few games ahead.
“I think consistently over the course of the season there’s been a real focus on energy. We know when we’re good and we know there’s things to improve on if we’re quite not on our game.
“Being back to what we do best is going to be needed tomorrow. We pride ourselves on winning duels, first and second balls and playing with a lot of energy.
“At times, on the weekend, that was certainly missing but we spoke this week, debriefed and are ready to re-align the team in the stuff that we’re good at.
“We want to win every game. That [57 points] is a goal that our management team want to reach. Certainly as a group of players and what we’re achieving this year, we have a goal and once we’ve reached that goal, we’ll draw a line under that and kick on to the next one.”
Having won four of their last seven matches away from home, County make the trip to Essex in high spirits despite a narrow defeat to automatic promotion hopefuls Barrow last weekend.
And Dunne knows all too well the challenge that his former employees will possess for County as they look to return to winning ways in Sky Bet League Two.
“Going into this weekend is going to be tough,” Dunne added.
“A lot of people wouldn’t have expected them to be where they are and a lot of people wouldn’t have expected us to be where we are. It’s an important weekend starting with Friday.
“I think the one thing that’s changed since they’ve come in [new managerial team] is that they are vastly experienced and people I know really well from my time working in Essex.
“Since they’ve come in they’ve improved the duel percentage, the overall fact that they’re in more games. You can see from the results that they’ve had, they’re have a way of playing, they’ve increased their aggression and increased their opportunity to stay in games a lot better.
“That’s evident with a lot of draws and especially with the pitch and so on.”
