Wigan boss Leam Richardson hails significant win at Gillingham - 7M sport

Wigan boss Leam Richardson hails significant win at Gillingham



Posted Sunday, October 03, 2021 by PA

Wigan boss Leam Richardson hails significant win at Gillingham

Wigan boss Leam Richardson believes their 2-0 win at Gillingham could prove to be one of their most important results of the season after they moved to the top of League One.

Max Power and Will Keane scored second-half goals for the Latics in an absorbing game at Priestfield.

Wigan are now top on goal difference from Sunderland and Richardson was proud of how they battled to victory and bounced back from a 2-1 loss to Sheffield Wednesday on Tuesday.

“It’s one of them results that you hopefully look back on at the end of the season and take a lot of plaudits for,” he said.

“The lads, again, can take a lot of credit for the result. You’ve got to come here, out of possession and the small details.

“They’ll certainly put you on your backfoot with a lot of long throw-ins, and they’re very direct.

“I thought that we had a lot of good performances out there today and we spoke about it a lot this week. Certainly after the game on Tuesday and coming here and doing the small details correctly.

“In the first half I thought we controlled large parts of the game, but thought we could do better and have more of an initiative in the final third.

“Those were the questions at half time, and in the second half we came out and scored two well-worked goals.”

Wigan went in front on 63 minutes when Power latched onto a deep cross from James McClean to head home from a tight angle at the far post.

Keane put the result beyond doubt 18 minutes later, placing the ball into the bottom right corner from inside the penalty area.

“They were always going to dominate possession to a large degree, but we thought that we caused them problems,” said Gillingham assistant Paul Raynor.

“We probably didn’t cause them enough problems on the ball, but at 0-0 they weren’t creating too many chances. We sort of gift them the first goal, which is disappointing.

“With the quality that they’ve got in their side and the quality that they have on the bench and in their squad, you cannot give them opportunities to create chances because they will take them.

“It was important that we tracked their full-backs all the way in, we didn’t, and we got punished for it. You can run forward and try to create things but you have to run the other way and defend. We didn’t do that on two occasions and got punished.”

“We have to look at the reality of two poor goals with an OK performance. We were in the game for large periods.”

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