Doyle: It's a battle of nerves now

Three games unbeaten have given Pool’s chances of survival a major boost, with back-to-back home games against Southend and Colchester to come in the next week.

They remain just a point from the drop with both Fleetwood and Oldham having two games in hand on the Seasiders, and keeper Doyle is realistic enough to know it could go right to the final day.

“Teams below us are picking up result and this is going to be tight,” admitted the 30-year-old.

“It’s going to go right until the end.

“We have six games left now and I think if we take it a game at a time we’ll be fine.

“We can’t look at the last six and hope we win three as that will just put pressure on us.

“We’ve shown in the last three games we can hold our nerves.

“Those games against teams around us has been vital. There’s no question about our nerves, we are a strong enough bunch to push on now.”

Wins at Crewe and Doncaster and a point at home to Bury moved Blackpool out of the bottom four and lifted the gloom which had set in at Bloomfield Road.

And the Irishman is delighted Pool appear to be hitting form at just the right time.

He said: “It’s three unbeaten now and I think we’d have been delighted if you’d told us we’d got seven points, including wins against Crewe and Doncaster.

“Everyone’s buzzing at the moment and looking forward to Saturday.

“We knew we had to come into form, we knew we needed a run of results and we’ve managed to do that in the last three.

“It was vital we did that, it’s been huge.”

For Doyle Blackpool’s win against Doncaster on Monday was extra special, it being their first clean sheet in nine games.

That is something which he hopes he can make a regular occurrence in their last six games.

He said: “It was great to keep a clean sheet on Monday, the last one was Oldham at home which was quite a while a go now.

“If we can do that again today then we’ll have a chance of a point, if not three. We went through a faze of keeping a lot of clean sheets, we were up there in the clean sheet table.

“The problem then is we weren’t scoring goals.

“Now we’ve started to score some goals but aren’t keeping many clean sheets.

“It’s important we can do that now.”

Blackpool’s players were granted time off this week after their three-game unbeaten run, enjoying Tuesday and Wednesday away from Bloomfield Road.

For Doyle it was time off which will be key for them come the end of the season.

“It’s been good to have a couple of days off, it’s nice to have a break,” he insisted.

“We had a tough Easter period which we were virtually in for ten days solid.

“It’s allowed everyone to recharge the batteries and we are raring to go now.”