LYE Town’s boss has called for the FA to introduce a mid-season break into the fixture list after his side’s tie against Coventry Sphinx was postponed.

Martin Thomas had his players training on a 3G pitch on Saturday afternoon after the Midlands League match was called off at 10am due to bad weather.

The team’s co-manager said a break is “common sense” and believes that no games should be played in January to allow for pitches and players to recover.

“There is no point in playing games in January,” Thomas said. “I’ve always tried to get as many games in as we can before the middle of December.

“Play Saturday – Tuesday every week, because you lose so many games in January due to the weather.

“You wouldn’t lose out on anything by not playing the games, because most teams only play on Saturdays anyway and even then the games get called off. Those fixtures could easily be rescheduled for Tuesday evenings in March and April.

“It would give the pitches a chance to recover and let the groundsmen work on them for the back half of the season.

“When we played Walsall Wood a few weeks ago the game destroyed our pitch.

“The players don’t want to have to travel to play away from home on a freezing cold Tuesday night. At the end of the day, the players in this league are still part-timers and those games take a lot out of them.

“To me it’s common sense.”

Thomas has a near full contingent of players travelling to Heanor Town on Saturday (3pm kick off) with the boss hoping to pick up at least a point at one of the league’s “funny sides”.

He added: “We never know what to expect from Heanor. At the weekend they lost to Brocton, but so did we, so you can’t take anything from that.

“They’ve got some very decent players and they’re a top six side, but they’re one of those teams who always seem to play better against the sides at the top of the league than those at the bottom.

“When we played them earlier this season it was a draw, but it was ruined by the amount of yellow cards which were handed out to both teams.

“I hope it’s not the same this weekend and we get a good game, but they'll relish this game and there’s a lot of pressure on us to get something from them after last time.”