Dino Maamria hails resilience and togetherness at Stevenage

Posted Sunday, January 13, 2019 by PA

Resilience and desire can take Stevenage a long way according to manager Dino Maamria after his side battled to a 2-1 home victory over Crawley.

Substitute James Ball’s first-half double paved the way to victory though Crawley had equalised through Dominic Poleon, with all three goals coming before the break.

The hosts were forced to hang on, though, with three key names coming off injured before the 70-minute mark as the hectic fixture schedule took its toll.

“We showed resilience and the will to win, the work-rate and togetherness was second to none,” he said.

“When a team has those things, they can go very far. The most important thing about this was the get the win and we did that.

“It’s what we stand for as a football club, we want to overachieve and we want to work harder than anybody else, we’ve got a group of players that work for each other and want to win football matches.

“James Ball looks natural there as a centre-forward, I thought he took his goals pretty well and could have scored in the second half for a hat-trick, but he showed a lot of maturity in that position.

“We were very good in the first half on the front foot, we should have scored a couple more, but we were trying not to hang on after that.”

Ball had only been on the pitch for 12 minutes when he opened the scoring, heading past Glenn Morris after Luther Wildin found space to cross.

Crawley levelled as Poleon held off his defender to fire home but Ball had the last say, tucking in a rebound after Danny Newton’s shot was saved.

“The performance we put in showed we have turned a corner,” said Crawley manager Gabrielle Cioffi.

“I think we have to look at what positives we have, in the second half especially we were the only team on the pitch.

“We have to collect the 10 points we need to be safe as soon as we can and then we can achieve the following target if we are hungry enough.

“We gifted them two goals, but we turned the corner in the second half and we need to take that performance into a tough game against Mansfield.

“We can’t afford to have four, five, six chances but not go in the goal, otherwise we undermine the quality football we are playing.

“Football sometimes can be a matter of not just centimetres but millimetres and it’s about how you challenge that. In the second half we showed we could challenge and we were dominant.”