DINO Maamria wants his Burton Albion side to show the same resilience and desire seen on Saturday as we take on Portsmouth at Fratton Park tomorrow (7.45pm kick-off).
The Brewers held firm and scored late to secure a 1-0 win, a third successive victory, over Exeter City at the Pirelli at the weekend.
Maamria’s men face a much different proposition in Pompey tomorrow night, who have former Brewers captain John Mousinho at the helm in his first managerial role.
Having taken back-to-back wins in his first two games, Mousinho’s side have picked up one point from their last three.
But Maamria insists those scorelines do not reflect Pompey’s performances - and says his side have to be on the front foot at Fratton Park tomorrow night.
“It always is difficult at Portsmouth,” said Maamria. “They’re good at certain things, and obviously they’ve had a difficult time as well and have had a change of management. That comes with the good and the bad things, if that makes sense. They are in a transition period.
“For us, it’s a game that, similar to last week against Fleetwood (in that) it’s a difficult fixture, but we’ve just got to focus on us. We’ve got to defend with the same resilience we showed on Saturday, with that desire and attitude to defend our goal with numbers and then attack with numbers as well.
“We’ve got to make sure we turn up there on the front foot and play our football, we’re not going there just to defend. You have to do both sides of the game.
“I watched their games and they’ve been quite consistent, quite good, and they were very unfortunate to lose against Plymouth on Saturday where I thought they were very good. I know the scoreline is 3-1 but it wasn’t a 3-1 game.
“They’ve had three tough games against Peterborough, Barnsley and Plymouth and got one point, but in every one of those games they were well worth at least a point. They’re competing against top teams and they’ve got a good squad of players, but they’ve had a difficult season obviously.”
Maamria will be without midfielder Mark Helm, who suffered a thigh injury early on in that Exeter win, but the news is better for the former Burnley and Manchester United man than first feared.
The Brewers manager also provided injury updates on several other members of his squad.
"It's not as bad as we thought (for Mark)," said Maamria. "But we've got to monitor that situation.
"We've got some of our younger players who are struggling. Ciaran Gilligan is still injured but will hopefully be back with us on Thursday.
"Jonny Smith and Bobby Kamwa, we're not sure about it, (it's) 50/50. You add Helmy to them, it's four young prospects missing, and Terry Taylor still looks like he's out for a while.
"It's key players that are missing for us but hopefully we can make the right changes to make sure our performance level stays as high as it has been lately."