INTERVIEW: You need days like these

“It was a very bizarre way to finish, but I’m glad it was bizarre in our favour,” he admitted. “Lady luck can be against you when you’re on these runs and in this type of situation, but credit to the lads for the fact they kept going. 

“You need days like these sometimes, just to help you along, and I think if fans see that type of effort and determination then they will always give you their support. We’ve got an honest group of players and things haven’t been going great for us over the last few weeks, so this has given us a huge lift.”

“I thought we played some decent stuff in the first half and we kept getting the ball into the right areas,” he told us. “We were where we wanted to be for a lot of the game and sometimes the effort and determination pays off. 

“We were disjointed at times, we can’t avoid that, but that will always happen when you concede goals the way we did. The big thing for us was the manner in which we reacted.”

“It was a strange finish to the game and you don’t see too many of them,” he conceded. “But we come away feeling like we’ve won it rather than just grabbed a point. Even with my level of optimism I thought the game had been lost. 

“It’s a massive point for us because Bury and Scunthorpe have both been beaten, and it’s all about positive results at this stage of the season. We just need to get across the line and then we can regroup and redress where we are as a club.”

“Something like this is a reward for the players because they have been feeling down on themselves with the way things have gone,” he said. “We need to lift them up and make them believe in their own ability because we need them to do the job for us. 

“They’ve scored three goals against a side which is going to be involved in the play-offs, and the way we got those goals so late in the day makes it even better.”

“We’ve said all along that we’ll get to the safety mark, but it isn’t easy,” he admitted. “As games go by you feel a mounting pressure and you have to deal with that. 

“The good thing today is that a lot of teams haven’t played and we have managed to open up a little bit more of a gap. That’s important in terms of bringing more confidence into the way we want to do things.

“Shrewsbury is now a massive game for us. If we can get through that unscathed then we can start to really look at what we want to do going forward. This is a point which has definitely helped us along the way.”

“The dressing room is unbelievable at the moment,” he said. “You’d have thought we’d just won the FA Cup. I think Manny [Mathieu Manset] thought he’d just scored a World Cup winner when the equaliser went in. Games like this can change the whole feeling around a place and the lads are buoyant because they’ve got a result from a game that looked dead and buried. The feelings from this will spill over into Wednesday and Thursday and then hopefully into the game on Friday.” 

“The fans are still turning up for us but they are feeling down as well at the moment,” he added. “They’ve needed something to talk about and maybe Manny will bring a bit of that for them. We need to keep producing things like this so that we can lift the whole place again. 

“I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I focus on the three goals we scored as a real positive for us. The goals we conceded are a huge negative, we hold our hands up to that, but I think the way we got that result has to be seen as something to congratulate the lads for.” 

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