Two wins on the bounce and a clean sheet…wow, it’s been a while but boy does it feel good!
I’ve always had a simple motto with football, which states the obvious but could not bring it home more to players: If you don’t score you don’t win. If you don’t concede, you don’t lose.
It doesn’t matter that Plymouth were pretty poor and completely toothless in attack, because just getting that clean sheet will be a huge psychological boost for the players.
The match was quite bitty and ragged in places and I thought both teams looked like they were feeling the effects of playing twice just a few days apart.
But I still liked that Neil Warnock chose the same team that won against West Brom just a few days earlier. It was a risk in the sense that some of the players may not have been capable to give their best without proper recovery. But Warnock showed trust and that he’s willing to give a winning team a go without making changes.
It’s that stability and consistency that’s been missing and I believe that authority and command has led to the first clean sheet in well over 20 games.
And we were always the better team here. There wasn’t a great deal of quality football being played, but anything that was any good came from our lot and we worked well as a unit going forward and backwards.
We appeared more organised and more confident about what we were supposed to be doing at certain points and that’s something I’ve not seen in us for a long time. It’s a real positive but it’s got to last and there’s still room for improvement too.
I was pleased with the work the midfield put in and I thought Mikele Leigertwood was much improved from Saturday. It still amazes me how strong he is sometimes and just bounces or shifts people off the ball, even when it looks like he’s about to lose possession.
I did think we were a little bit careless with our final ball at times though, even if we did get some good deliveries into dangerous areas. Sometimes the players need to be a little bit more aware of the weight and the timing of that crucial pass, because we should have really netted more than the two goals we got and they were somewhat fortunate.
We also could have passed the ball on the deck a little bit and with a bit more tempo, but this is just nit-picking because I thought there were more opportunities to really prise Plymouth open had we utilised certain passages of play.
Overall though you can’t argue with two wins out of two, a first clean sheet in months and getting the job done when historically we may not have.
I was always confident we were going to win this match and that is the best feeling to have about the team in a long time. I just hope we can really push on now and finish the season as well as we can. There’s still so many games to go and this group have got to believe they can get as high up that table as possible and better last season’s finish.
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