Joey Barton bids to make Fleetwood fans so proud

The first leg of Town’s League One play-off semi-final against Wycombe Wanderers at Highbury will be played behind closed doors, as will the Adams Park rematch next Monday.

Barton has praised the Cod Army support in the past and knows the fans will be with his team in spirit as they seek a Wembley final against Oxford United or Portmouth.

Speaking to the club website, the head coach said: “You’d always want your fans behind you because we’ve seen multiple times that when they’re there in their numbers and back the players they can have a huge effect. They can certainly raise the level of performance for a lot of our boys.

“We won’t get that because of the restrictions on allowing people in but we hope to make them proud.

“That’s the key – to make people proud of the team.

“Hopefully they’ll be able to watch the game on iFollow or on Sky, and no doubt they’ll be with us in spirit and roaring the lads on.

“This is a tight-knit community, a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business.

“I’m pretty sure if the lads do well and manage to achieve something that has not been done here before, the whole town of Fleetwood will let them know about what they’ve done and we’ll have a good get-together whenever we’re able to.”

With potentially three huge games on the horizon in Fleetwood’s bid to play Championship football next season, the 37-year-old is not getting carried away. Barton is not looking beyond the first leg, giving it the highest billing.

He added: “We can’t get away from the first game – it’s the most important game of our lives on Friday night, there’s no getting away from that. You can’t save something for the second leg and then try to save something for the final.

“That’s 10 days later and you might not even have that opportunity – the game might be beyond you. We need to make sure we turn up on Friday night and give a great account of ourselves.

“If we can leave the ground on Friday making the people of the town proud of what they’ve just watched, then that for us is progress.

“For us, finishing in the play-offs is a huge achievement. But our relentlessness as a group and our desire to push on has stopped us patting each other on the back.”

“We don’t think we’ve got the job done, we set out to get automatic promotion or to win the league this season.”

“With nine games to go we felt we were jockeying to achieve that, albeit there were teams that felt the same way.

“We were on a run of form that would suggest that we were going to be thereabouts but it’s been disrupted. “