AFTER their stunning FA Cup triumph against former Premier League champions Leicester City, Newport County AFC are aiming to kick-start their League Two campaign at Crewe Alexandra today.

Since Michael Flynn was named manager of the month for September, with his side sitting second in the table, County have won only three out of 15 in the league and earned just 14 points from a possible 45.

Cup success and the postponement of the home clash with MK Dons means the Exiles have games in hand on most of their rivals, but that poor run of form has seen them slip to 13th in the table.

And Flynn knows that his side need to put a string of positive results together to get back into the promotion picture – starting at Crewe this afternoon.

“We’ve got to start winning league games,” said the manager.

“We’ve not been on a great run in the league and we need a result. We need to kick-start the season now and start putting some back-to-back wins together.

“If we do that then we’ll be very close with a lot of momentum going into the final three months of the season.

“We’ve seen it lots of times where teams fade and other teams come from nowhere.

“It’s going to be tough,” he added. “We’ll have a lot of games now – Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday, Tuesday – because there are three to be organised.

“But hopefully we have a lot better luck with injuries this second half of the season, because I really do think that has hampered us.”

Flynn admitted before the win over Leicester that he shared the fans’ frustrations over recent results but he’s adamant that they should have beaten Crawley Town and Stevenage.

And he’s hoping the players can replicate the levels of intensity and concentration that they showed last Sunday on a regular basis.

“The last two games we should have had an extra five points,” he said. “I wasn’t too disappointed by the performances, it was just a lack of ruthlessness in both boxes.

We didn’t kill off Stevenage or Crawley. At least against Crawley we were solid and we got the clean sheet, and we should have done that at Stevenage.

“We could see it wasn’t our day in front of goal and we should have made sure we came away with at least a point. But we didn’t.

“We’ve got to prepare them right and have the right game-plan,” added Flynn. “But we don’t always get it right. You need the players to carry out instructions and to back themselves as well, and that’s what they did on Sunday.

“They believed in themselves, they backed each other and they kept going. You saw the blocks they put in, the amount of running they covered. It was a good team performance.

“Now they’ve got to get that into their heads and take it into Saturday, and the rest of the season.”