FORMER Bulls goalkeeper Matt Baker is backing his old team-mate Jamie Pitman to get Hereford United out of trouble this season.

Baker was forced to quit playing by a knee injury and now combines media work with a job in the engineering trade but still retains a close association with his old pal.

"Jamie is my best friend and was my best man,"

said Baker. "He is doing very well.

"He took over a team which I had seen earlier in the season when Simon Davey was in charge and, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t think the players were good enough.

"There was not too much wrong with the style of play and the ethos in what they were trying to do was right. I’ve spoken to Jamie and he said that they were doing everything right and that Simon was doing everything right but, for whatever reason, it just didn’t work out."

Baker acknowledges that the only way was up for the Bulls when Pitman took over.

"When you take over a team that’s doing so badly, you can’t really do any worse so you’re in a no-lose situation in the short-term.

"It’s in the medium term that people will start asking questions – we have seen it with caretakermanagers up and down the country; they do well at the beginning and then it’s a question of whether it can be sustained and Jamie is doing very well in a very tough situation.

"Usually, at this time of the year, the bottom two clubs are adrift but that is not really the case this season.

"Even though Hereford are bottom, they are still in with a great chance – League 2 is notoriously very tight and it’s not outrageous to say that they could finish in the top half of the table."

Baker believes that Pitman's knowledge of the game and his ability to understand players'

mentalities willl be crucial in the months ahead.

"Jamie brings commonsense and he knows the way to play football," said Baker. "There will not be an ideology where he will say that they have to play a particular way, come hell or high water; he knows the game, he knows how players think.

"Jamie understands how players respond and it is all about man-management these days.

"Players are naturally fitter, they have to be – the contracts are getting shorter. It’s a sort of Darwinism in football, more so than it ever has been – players can’t journey from club to club and get away with it any more; they know that they have to look after themselves.

"There’s a good example in Kenny Lunt - he has lost a stone in weight, he’s looking fitter and sharper and that’s probably because he knows that he has to if he is going to stay in the game with all these young pups.

"Sports science has gradually crept into football – it’s taken its time – so there are all these other things which are almost a given nowadays.

So the most important thing is getting your message across to the players and getting them to carry it out.

"You can have the best training sessions in the world, the best ideas in the world but if you can’t communicate that to the players and get them to buy into it then it all makes no difference.

Jamie has that ability."

Baker can draw from personal experience about how an apparently impossible position can be retrieved - even right at the last possible moment.

"I’m absolutely convinced that Hereford can get out of this problem,"

he said.

"When I went to Milton Keynes we were bottom of the league and everyone thought we were relegated, it was just a case of who was going to go down with us.

"Miraculously, we survived in the last three minutes of the season.

"So we were dead, buried and written off – that is far from the case with Hereford. The league is tight, Jamie’s playing the right way and he’s playing the right formation for this league.

"Jamie knows what he is doing."