Ahead of Saturday’s Sky Bet League Two clash with Carlisle United, Neil Aspin stresses the importance of improving his Vale side’s home form, claiming it will define their season.
Despite Vale's poor home form, Aspin's side our now unbeaten in their last five league meetings away from home heading into this weekend's game with Carlisle.
However, having not won a league game at home since the 4th December, the boss has highlighted this as a major issue and is determined to put things right this Saturday.
He said: "It's going to be a difficult game because Carlisle are doing well; they've won seven of their last ten games.
"But we can't pick and choose who we're going to play, we've got to improve our own form. We have to make sure we defend better than we have done in the home games because we need to be solid to try and win the game.
"That's going to define our season, how we do at home. We can't expect to be picking up results away from home all the time, but certainly at home you have to be winning your fair share of games.
With Tom Pope still recovering from a hamstring injury, Aspin may turn to new signing Mark Harris, who signed on loan from Cardiff City this week.
Harris has claimed he is itching to get going having met up with his team-mates and trained over the last few days, though it won't be an easy task with Ricky Miller and Danny Elliott still fighting it out for a place in Aspin's starting eleven.
Following the signing of Harris, the boss has praised the forward ahead of Saturday's fixture.
"It's difficult to get players in at this stage but I've said in previous interviews, we need players who have played football at this level, and he's had a loan spell at Newport and he did quite well there." He said.
"He was obviously someone we wanted to bring in and he'll now be available for Saturday.
"If we've got a couple of forwards who have come in, we've got Popey coming back from injury and Ricky Miller who's played the last couple of games, then we've got four strikers who will have played league football."