Rovers boss Darrell Clarke heaped praise on his players after they extended their winning run to five games at Southport on Saturday. Jake Gosling scored the winning goal in the 13th minute of a game in which Rovers had to show plenty of defensive resolve to go on and claim another victory. Clarke has now seen his side overcome a disappointing start to the campaign and climb to fourth in the Vanarama Conference table, having won all five of the games since they lost at Braintree on September 6. Clarke said: âIâm really pleased for the players and I think they deserve a lot of credit for the way they have gone about their business over the last few weeks. They had to accept a fair bit of criticism for their performances during the first week of the season, which was completely understandable. There were a lot of questions being asked of us as a group, and the positive manner in which they have responded when it could have gone the other way is fantastic. If someone had told me that we would be in the top five by the end of September after we had lost at Altrincham and only collected one point from our first three games, Iâd have been more than happy with that. We have to keep working hard to try to maintain this sort of form because if you keep winning games the table will take care of itself.â Rovers also avoided defeat away from home at the hands of a part-time side for a third time this season following the earlier disappointments at Altrincham and Braintree Town, and Clarke added: âThese are always going to be difficult games for us and more often than not you have to be prepared to grind out a result. There are a lot of games that are going to be like that for us away from home this season and it is good that we can refer back to performances like the one on Saturday and know we are capable of doing exactly that. Southport are a strong and physical side, who asked a lot of questions of us, and it was a very hard-fought victory. I think we dealt with everything they attempted to throw at us in the second half and in the end Steve Mildenhall only really had one save to make. The performance wasnât as good as weâd have liked, but we have got our first clean sheet away from home and we go away delighted to have claimed three points. The margins are very fine in this league. You wonât always play well in every game and when that is the case, you must have it within you to grind out a result. The players have had a lot of plaudits just lately for the football they have played, but today it was about putting bodies on the line. Sometimes you have to win ugly and that was an ugly win. It is a big three points for us because we have now won two games on the bounce away from home. That is massive for us because we need to address our form away from the Memorial Stadium if we are to be successful this season.â From the Post.
Mmmm good interview but not sure about the headline - I wouldn't say the club had any kind of 'revival' until we get out of non-league. Sure, results have improved and performances are better but we've done nothing yet. I want to see how the team and fans react to a setback, because we will have some maybe starting at Eastleigh tomorrow. Another issue is goals. We may be 4th but we've scored the same number of goals as Telford who are bottom. At the moment we're relying on the defence and Mildenhall to keep us in games, because we're not putting teams away like Barnet and Torquay are. It's good to see us on a run but it's early days and talk of 'revivals' is rather premature.
Thats the post for you... Here are their tweets about Rovers and City this morning.... must have taken them ages to think if them! Tweet: "Bristol Rovers boss Darrell Clarke hails his players for the club's revival" Tweet: "Bristol City boss Steve Cotterill hails character and team spirit of his table-topping side"
In historical news: Hail Caesar! Weather: Hail forecast. Fascist news: Hail (sic) Hitler! In other news: Man hails taxi! The Post is ****, isn't it?!!!
