Gary Peters urges supporters to get behind Hereford United's young guns

The ex-Shrewsbury Town chief believes Hereford are more united since his arrival at the club around six weeks ago.

Peters called Hereford the ‘worst team in the Football League’ when he set foot through the Edgar Street door.

But he said yesterday (Wednesday): “The attitude of the players has made the club better than they were before.

“The players have given themselves the task of working harder.

“We need to get the players fitter so they can work hard and play faster.

“They are working much harder but it will take two months before we get to where we need to be.”

United crashed out of the FA Cup last Saturday after a dismal showing in a 3-0 defeat to Yeovil Town.

And, looking ahead to this Saturday’s League 2 home clash with Burton Albion, Peters has praised the hunger and desire of United’s young players.

“We’ve got nine players who have come in - they’re not worried about the money,” said Peters.

“The nine of them are on £1,000 between them a week, that’s an average of £110 each.

“We want supporters to get behind them because these lads are having a real go.

“The budget has been used up and we are actually over budget at the moment.

“Some of them are getting paid by their own club and we have some, Richard Peniket and Kern Miller, who are being allowed to train with us for free.

“Will Evans is on loan for nothing from Swindon and Nathan Elder has come here for next to nothing to prove a point. Tom Barkhuizen’s wages are very small.

“Tyler Weir and Bruno (Benoit Dalibard) are on very little wages to prove they can be footballers at this level.

“It’s important that they are not judged the same as a player on £1,200 a week.

“If we don’t get back on budget by January, we might have an embargo put on us, but we don’t want to think about that yet.

“We can’t have the wages which we had at the start of last season. We have gone down the ‘hungry player’ route.”

Peters said that Luton Town had agreed to take Janos Kovacs, believed to be one of United’s highest earners, in the January transfer window.

“Kovacs has pretty much left the club now,” admitted Peters.

But he said there might still be hope for Sean Canham, who is on loan at Bath City.

“Canham is getting some football under his belt at Bath.

“We will look at it at the end of the month and you never know, Canham might be coming back to us.”

Peters said ‘fitness issues’ were behind United’s decision not to sign former Premiership defender Andy Todd.

“We see training every day and you can't have people playing on a Saturday, but not training during the week,” said Peters.

“We need a group of fit athletes and we need players to be fit all of the time or most of the time.

“You can’t make the back four stronger, or put things in place to make the team stronger, if people aren’t at training.

”We have to become better and have to be training with everyone for as long as we can.

“Everyone would have seen how well Todd played against Barnet and Bradford.

“But we didn’t think that was the case in the away matches against Northampton and Torquay.

“We have to practise and work hard and we can’t do that together if people are spending a lot of time with the physio.”