Ollie going for goals Bloomfield Road, Blackpool Lancashire England

Ollie going for goals

Blackpool boss wants to try and out-score opponents in top-flight

Blackpool boss Ian Holloway intends to be positive and go for goals as the Seasiders prepare for life in the Premier League.

While some newly promoted teams try to stifle the creativity of their more illustrious top-flight opponents, Holloway insists this will not be the case with Blackpool.

Instead, he wants his team to keep possession and their game plan will be to try and outscore opponents.

Holloway told the Daily Mail: "If you look at any standard, the higher you get the better they are at keeping the ball.

"Spain proved it in the World Cup. If your whole ethos is about keeping it and passing it, and you teach people control and movement, then that's the way to go.

"It's easy to say that's because they are world class players. But why are they? How did they get like that? Were they born world class or were they manufactured? My argument is that they were manufactured and it just takes practice, practice, practice.

"The more you keep doing it, the more you believe in it, and the better the players become.

Not defensive

"I don't want to be defensive. We'll be playing teams who will be much better at keeping the ball, but I still want mine to get better with passing and keeping it and moving and that's what we will focus on

"It's what we did last year and we won all three play-off games like it, home, away and at Wembley."

Holloway added he has learnt from the experience after he spent a year out of football after being sacked following Leicester's relegation.

"It devastated me," he admitted. "One week I was picking a team at Plymouth that won and reached fourth in the table, and then when I moved (to Leicester) I could hardly win a game and went down. It doesn't get much worse.

"If I didn't have such a wonderful wife and family I wouldn't have ever got over it. Until Blackpool happened, I had a year when often I couldn't get near an interview, let alone a job.

"So what I now know is what I have to do for them, and that means trying to make sure my teams understand very clearly what I want, and then being patient enough to work with them and encourage them.

"We are going into a standard that has left us light years behind, in truth. The infrastructure of the club is groaning.

Hamstrung us

"We are the only club ever that have had to build a whole new stand and even that has hamstrung us. We've got to turn our first home game into an away game, so we have five of the first six away.

"You can normally scrub all of them off, so that's no points from 15, but we can't look at it like that."

He added he will be demanding his side go out and attack opponents this term.

"OK, we've changed the opposition and that's gone in a pretty worrying dimension if you look at some of the results that some of them had," he said.

"But how many times did other teams go to the big clubs and try to retain possession and move the ball from one side to the other? Or were they more worried about blocking up these people?

"When you've gone a goal or three down, where's your game plan then? Our game plan, and you saw it in the run-in and the play-offs, is to outscore the opposition, so if we let a goal in it didn't knock us, didn't dent our confidence, to say 'OK, we'll outscore them'.

"We might not be good enough to outscore Mr Drogba and all those, but we'll have a right go at it."