RAMSBOTTOM United have put a disappointing October behind them.

That is the hope of manager Chris Willcock who hopes that, following seven points from their last three games, the Rams have come through their sticky period for the season and are ready to stage a challenge at the top of the table.

After last week’s 2-1 win at Prescot Cables, Rammy saw off City of Liverpool in a thumping 5-0 win at the Riverside Stadium on Tuesday night, and Willcock could barely hide his delight that their bad patch may be at an end.

“I’m ecstatic, I thought we were excellent from start to finish,” he said.

“Some of the football we played was outstanding but I was even more pleased with our play out of possession and we kept a clean sheet so full credit to the lads.”

The victory, courtesy of a Tom Kennedy penalty, Iyrwah Gooden’s double and late strikes from Reuben Jerome and Josh Hmami, leaves Rammy eighth in the BetVictor League North West Division.

And, with their blip now in the rear-view mirror, Willcock says his players need to recreate their performance levels when they go for a third straight league win when they host Marske United on Saturday.

“I saw a massive improvement [in a 1-1 draw] against Runcorn Linnets and the key word is confidence,” added the manager. “They’ve grown over the last two weeks or so.

“I felt we should have got a clean sheet at Prescot but we didn’t manage to do so.

“We won’t get carried away, we’ve had a really tough October and on the back of that we’ve had three good results so we’ll look forward to welcoming Marske here on Saturday and seeing if we can reproduce that again.

“There’s quality from top to bottom in this league, anybody can beat anybody on any given Tuesday or Saturday.

“Hopefully we’ve now had our month where things haven’t gone well for us and we’ve had our tough time of the season, which generally happens.

“It’s nice to get seven points out of nine, some of the football was exceptional and hopefully now we can kick on.

We work hard on all attacking aspects, really. we just found more space out side tonight than maybe we have done in other games but we try to link up through the middle with runners in behind etcetera. Tonight there was extra space in the wide areas and I think we exploited it quite well.

After we’d controlled the first half and being in a really good position we talked about a clean sheet at half time. Off the back of that we wanted them to get a clean sheet and we did so. I just felt as the game opened up there was a lot more space to work in and we really came into out own.

I have to say I felt the whole of the back line, but especially our centre-halves, were outstanding. At full-back TK was his usual competent self and Ben Hampson was playing well up until he went off and once we changed it round and put Reece [Fishwick] in there he went and did a job for us.