Striker Ashley Nadesan made it three goals from six outings when he came off the bench to notch United’s equaliser at Exeter on Saturday afternoon and manager Keith Curle was quick to acknowledge the important contribution from a player who was unlucky not to feature in the starting eleven.
“Ashley is a player who can make a good and positive impact,” Curle said. “He has a knack of being reliable, consistent and dependable inside the box. He doesn’t mind physical contact and he strikes the ball well, so he was always going to be a good option to have as the game went on.
“I decided not to start with him because I had good information about the condition of the pitch. I looked at what I thought would be the best way for us to approach the game and for us to get forward momentum.
“Exeter don’t have what I class as a dominant centre back, so I wanted us to get the ball forward to our big strikers and we looked at them to make sure it wasn’t going to come straight back at us.”
“With the conditions as they were, it was never going to be a natural game for Ashley. The flair players were always going to find it difficult to judge the run of the ball, so we looked at putting the two big lads up front.
“Players like Ashley Nadesan, Kris Twardek and John O’Sullivan understand that, and Reggie Lambe comes into that as well. They know conditions can rule them out until the time is absolutely right in a game, if pitches and surfaces are heavy.
“We wanted our strikers to get us on the front foot and once you have that momentum it becomes easier to introduce pace and start to play between people. Sometimes if you try that from the start of a game you can get involved in a more intricate style of play, which the conditions don’t really allow you to play as well as you would like to.”
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