Keith Millen relieved as Carlisle end wait for victory and a home goal

Posted Sunday, November 28, 2021 by PA

Keith Millen expressed his relief as Carlisle narrowly avoided setting an unwanted record thanks to a late 1-0 win over Walsall.

The Cumbrians looked destined to coast towards a sixth successive home league game without scoring, but Tristan Abrahams snatched an 88th-minute winner to end their nine-hour goal drought at Brunton Park.

The 22-year-old ran onto a Rod McDonald volley and finished with aplomb, ending a 12-match winless run and handing Keith Millen a first league win as Carlisle boss in the process.

Millen said: “It made for a nervous last seven minutes, but it was a goal that we’ve deserved for the work the players have put in recently.

“We all knew the pressure of this game; it was a tough game in not great conditions, and it wasn’t a great spectacle from a football point of view, but if that’s how we have to be sometimes then that’s what we have to do.

“We looked comfortable and they never opened us up. I’m delighted with the clean sheet but the way that we kept it, too. That’s the basis of what we are; we have to recognise we’re not a prolific goal-scoring team at the moment, so we have to keep it tight.

“I could sense a change in our mentality and we had to really compete today. That puts us in a really good place where we know we can compete against the big, physical teams.”

The travelling Saddlers, hoping to stretch their unbeaten away record in League Two to six games, started promisingly and nearly opened the scoring through Otis Khan inside sixty seconds.

However, their bright start soon faded out with stopper Mark Howard equal to George Miller and Joss Labadie as Abrahams’ late winner resigned Walsall to a second loss in nine.

A dejected Matt Taylor said: “We were nowhere near as good as we were on Tuesday and that’s the disappointing thing for me. I’ve asked the players for more consistency and we didn’t get that high-level performance.

“I look at the group of players that we’ve got and the performance that they’ve put in today isn’t good enough. Every team’s striving for a level of consistency and I think our players can do it, but we haven’t done that, switched off once and got punished for it.

“It’s a difficult one to take because I felt we had enough of the ball, we just didn’t use it enough. We didn’t deal with their strengths well enough, so a point probably would’ve been a fair result.

“We’ve not taken the chances we’ve created; we should’ve scored two goals in the first three minutes, but when you don’t do your job on set-plays, you get punished.”