Mansfield Town travel to Newport County for opening game of the season

Mansfield Town will travel to Rodney Parade, the home of Newport County, for the Stags’ first fixture of the Sky Bet League Two season.

Both of these teams have intense rivalry between them with the teams locking horns last season in the play-offs with Newport able to beat Mansfield on penalties to secure a place at Wembley. They were ultimately beaten by Tranmere and stayed in League Two for the time being.

Team news

For the amber and blues, Bobby Olejnik, Willem Tomlinson, Jordan Graham, Craig Davies and Hayden White will be unavailable in this fixture.

The Exiles will be without striker Ade Azeez, who picked up an Achilles injury in pre-season.

Michael Flynn

Newport manager, Michael Flynn spoke about his team needing to secure a good start to the season.

He said:

“I want to start well; I want to beat Mansfield as I want to beat everybody we play. We know that won’t happen because I don’t think any team has ever won all 46 games in League Two.

“Realistically we want to look at the areas we can improve. But I’m under no illusions that Mansfield will be there or thereabouts at the end of the season.”

John Dempster

At a recent press conference, Mansfield’s manager John Dempster spoke about his players giving it everything in this upcoming campaign.

He said:

“We’ll be really encouraging the players to focus on the short term – I think if you take your eye off that, then that’s when you can run into issues,” he said.

“We’ll certainly be emphasising that to the players. They [squad]are excited and can’t wait to get started.”

Head-to-head

In the last five outings between the two clubs, each team has two wins and they drew once back in the League Two play-offs

Expected line-ups

Newport County XI – Joe Day; Dan Butler, Mark O’Brien, Mickey Demetriou; Joss Labadie, Robbie Wilmott, Matthew Dolan, Andrew Crofts; Padraig Amond, Jamille Matt, Ben Kennedy.

Mansfield Town XI – Conrad Logan; Mal Benning, Ryan Sweeney, Krystian Pearce, Matt Preston, CJ Hamilton; Jacob Mellis, Alex MacDonald, Neal Bishop; Nicky Maynard, Danny Rose.