Accrington Stanley v Port Vale preview: Cook calling on bumper crowd at Crown (From This Is Lancashire)

Accrington Stanley v Port Vale preview: Cook calling on bumper crowd at Crown

10:04am Tuesday 21st August 2012 in Sport

ACCRINGTON Stanley boss Paul Cook hopes Saturday’s winning start to the League Two season at Southend United will result in a bumper crowd at the Crown Ground tonight.

Karl Sheppard’s goal gave the Reds a 1-0 victory in Essex but Cook knows they will face a tough test against a Port Vale side who beat Barnet 3-0 at the weekend.

Vale remain in administration after financial problems that have hampered Micky Adams’ prepar-ations for the new season.

But they will be backed by a sizeable away following and Cook hopes that Stanley fans will also turn out in numbers to help the Reds make it six points out of six.

“We’re really looking forward now, we want to prepare well for Port Vale and I think we’ll get a really good crowd in,” he said.

“It should be a great night, they had a good win on Saturday and we’ll really prepare for it properly.

“It’s all systems go for this game now and seeing what we can do against them.”

Saturday’s win at Southend was the Reds’ first opening day victory for five years and their first away win since January.

But Cook is refusing to get carried away, even if he took great encouragement from the result at Roots Hall.

“It’s a long season in League Two and you should enjoy every game that you can win, because we know that we’ll have tough games ahead,” he said.

“We’re not stupid, we certainly won’t get carried away. I say to people at the club all the time we won’t be down when we get beat and we’ll be the same now.

“Our preparation will be the same, we’ll work hard as we always do.

“You’ll get a lot of games where we’ll get it wrong and we won’t have a problem with that because we’ll back the lads 110 per cent.

“As long as they give us the effort like they did on Saturday we’ll be fine.

“We want to be really competitive in the league. Who knows where you’ll finish? We’ve played one game and we’ve won, and we’ll just move on to the next one.”