Port Vale’s battling qualities impress boss Darrell Clarke
Posted Sunday, July 31, 2022 by PA
Darrell Clarke hailed his Port Vale players’ mental strength after they came from behind to beat Fleetwood 2-1 in Sky Bet League One.
The Valiants, who came up via the play-offs last term, fell behind to Dan Batty’s sixth-minute goal.
However, centre-backs Connor Hall and Nathan Smith combined for an equaliser on the half-hour mark, before Hall netted a minute later to give the hosts a lead they never looked like surrendering.
And Clarke was full of praise for his team after they chalked up a first-day victory – a rarity during his managerial career.
He said: “It’s always nice to start off a new season with a win.
“I haven’t had many of them as a manager, we tend to lose the first one, so it’s nice to get the three points and even better to come from behind to win.
“It’s a characteristic of ours that we’ve carried on from last season and to get that in the first game in a higher league is something I’m delighted with.
“The players have got the mindset, they’ve got the mentality and it’s something they’ve created over a period of time.
“We know that if we go behind in a football match we can come back and win, so we were poor in the first 10 minutes, it took us a while to get going, then after that we were decent, we got on the front foot and caused them problems.
“It’s not just the responsibility of the centre-forwards to score, we’ve seen goals spread around last season and it’s great to get two centre-halves scoring.
“Do we know we need to strengthen in the top half of the pitch? Yes, obviously we do. We have players coming back in to give us extra firepower and hopefully we can have a good season.”
For Fleetwood, new boss Scott Brown was downbeat after his first game but insisted his side’s performance is not one that he will allow repeats of.
“It’s a hard one to take, any defeat is but especially when you go 1-0 up away from home,” said the Scot.
“We’ve got to be smarter too because it was two set plays that we’ve lost within a few minutes of each other.
“We started well, we passed the ball well but in the second half we didn’t try to play and weren’t brave enough, for us the intensity was nowhere near a Fleetwood team.
“Momentum is key and at that point they score one and score another almost straight away, so we’ve got to be a lot cuter as well, switched on in what we do and what we understand. There will be blocks, mistimed headers, things like that are part and parcel of it.
“We went 2-1 down and straight away we started to go long and direct and that wasn’t the football match that I wanted to see.
“They’re a physical team and they won a lot of the 50-50s and second balls, that’s not what I want to see from my football team.
“Between our defence, midfield and forward lines there were so many gaps so it was easy for them to play through and collect the second balls.
“So we’ll sit back, go through it and reflect on it – and that won’t happen again.”
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