Dave Challinor wants ‘perfect’ Stockport to maintain their momentum

Posted Saturday, August 24, 2024 by PA

Dave Challinor admitted he was delighted with his Stockport side’s perfect start to the Sky Bet League One season, following their 2-0 home win over Bristol Rovers.

Promoted as champions last term, County chalked up their third win in three – and with three clean sheets – courtesy of goals from Louie Barry and Kyle Wootton.

With the Hatters riding high in the season’s opening stages, Challinor is keen for their fine start to continue.

He said: “It’s the perfect start, to get nine points and three wins and without conceding a goal is obviously more than everyone would have wished for, or expected, to start the season.

“We’ve got to maximise this run as best as possible and move on quickly to the next game.

“Clean sheets give us a better chance of winning, that’s for certain, and I suppose people will always advocate that when you’re a newer team the defensive side of it is maybe easier to crack than the attacking side of it and that that sort of fluidity in terms of how you attack and go about things.

“But, in fairness, we’ve defended well. With football you need to defend, to make tackles and make blocks. You need your goalkeeper to make saves, you need a little bit of luck. I think we’ve had all those bits. So now we’ve got to run with that as best as we can.

“Of course, we’re going to concede a goal and it will be interesting to see how we respond.

“But we’ve just got to stick to what we’ve been good at, working hard and getting men behind the ball, making sure our defending’s bang-on, well organised and not allowing counter-attacking opportunities and that we do our jobs at set-pieces. All of those things will be massively important moving forward.”

Rovers had chances to salvage something from the game but with lacklustre finishing adding to their defensive frailties there was only ever likely to be one outcome.

Boss Matt Taylor said: “I liked a lot of aspects of the first half and then a mistake let them get their tails up in the game.

“I’ve said this for three weeks now and I don’t want to sound like a broken record but our use of the ball in certain areas of the park wasn’t good enough.

“We still created chances and then obviously the goal came out of absolutely nothing.

“That put us on the back foot and we’ve got to understand where the game is at.

“When we lose Chris (Martin) early on in the second half it was a blow – we couldn’t get a handle on the game and we defended a set-piece poorly.”

Taylor added: “We still created moments without really making their keeper really work or hitting the back of the net. So we can talk about positives in the game but it ended up 2-0 and the last 15 minutes of the game was painful because we’re down to 10 men and we’ve lost some players to injury.

“There are two elements we weren’t good at today, obviously the set-piece aspect and the goal out of nothing. But we have to work the goalkeeper more than we did when we get those chances.”