WESTON manager Mickey Bell said his players must make sure they are left with ‘no regrets’ after tomorrow’s (Saturday) glamour FA Cup tie with Doncaster Rovers.

The Seagulls are on a run of six straight league defeats, but have put their Vanarama Conference South form behind them to reach the FA Cup first round for the first time in 11 years, and just the third time in their history.

Bell said the Seagulls would look to overturn their underdog tag, starting as 9/1 outsiders with some bookmakers, and hold their own against Paul Dickov’s side.

He said: “We have got to try to compete. Sitting on the edge of the box and waiting to get beat isn’t the way I want us to go. We have got to try and impress ourselves on the game and the opposition as much as we can.

“If they are better than us, so be it but we don’t want to have any regrets we haven’t given a good account of ourselves, both for myself as a coach and for the players.

“I’ve seen bits of Doncaster and they are a good team who reflect their manager. He was a very hard-working player and they have inherited that mentality, they get the ball down and play and I’m expecting to see a decent football match. It will certainly suit us, playing a football game rather than a nuts and bolts Conference South game.”

The Seagulls are heading for a sell-out crowd for Saturday’s tie with Rovers, having sold more than 2,500 tickets already as cup fever grips the town, and Bell said the atmosphere among the team was buzzing ahead of the encounter.

He said: “It’s getting really exciting the way the momentum is growing and ticket sales still rising. But we have got to treat it as normally as we can, and go about our work as we would if it were a league game.

“Obviously, it’s going to be very difficult and we are under no illusions, but we are going to try and play our game as best we can, and try to play the match and not the occasion, and maybe even enjoy it.”

The Weston manager added the cup was a ‘nice deflection’ from their ongoing poor league form, but that it was still firmly in their minds.

“It’s given us a nice deflection from our league form, but whatever happens on Saturday we need to address our league form fairly quickly. We need to start getting some points on the board and with a few games in hand, they could put us back in lower mid-table.”