Mustoe demands final push in pursuit of records

Neil Mustoe’s Tuffley Rovers squad have gone 16 days without football and played just one in the last 30 days, as their 2024/25 season stutters to a close. However, Mustoe will demanding one final effort from his squad when Corsham Town visit on Tuesday evening, knowing he leads a team ready to re-write recent history.

Rovers’ promotion at the end of the 2014/15 season has been followed by ten consecutive seasons in the Hellenic League’s Premier Division competition and although the campaigns the Rovers manager has presided over since taking charge half-way through the 2021/22 season have seen his side battling to retain their status, the last 16 months have seen a dramatic improvement that saw his team finish 14th in 2023/24 and then build on that through the current campaign.

If his Rovers squad can produce one final performance of note, they have the potential to achieve three outcomes that will create history during this spell in Step 5 football.

A much improved defence have kept eleven clean-sheets in all competitions, to date, and one more will make this the joint best campaign since they started playing at Step 5 in 2015/16 (matching the 12 during 2022/23). If they can prevent visitors Corsham from scoring that will also guarantee them the point that they need to all but secure a 10th place finish, with the visiting Town currently three points behind, with two to play and an inferior goal difference that is unlikely to be sufficiently improved unless they defeat Rovers.

Another significant record in Mustoe’s sight is the one he set out to achieve at the start of the season, which is to exceed 50 points for the first time since the club’s halcyon days in the late 1990s. Since the start of the 2015/16 campaign their best total is 50 points, in 2016/17, with the next best the 49 points that Mustoe achieved last term.

Finally, Rovers know that a win would guarantee a 10th place finish but it would also mean that in league competitions Mustoe’s charges would have a number of wins equal to their number of defeats (15 of each), which has not been achieved since the relative success of the 2016/17 season.

Of course, Corsham Town will arrive at Glevum Park with their sights firmly on passing Rovers in the league table and knowing that their hosts have yet to record a win against Town at home since Corsham joined the Premier Division in 2021/22. In fact, Rovers have yet to score a home goal against Tuesday evening’s opposition and have only scored once in any league game against The Quarrymen….albeit that was a 1-0 win this season, when Mustoe and his squad returned from the Southbank Ground with all three points.