Being top of league has ‘nice ring’ to it, says Port Vale boss Darren Moore

Darren Moore says talking about his Port Vale team being top of League Two has a “nice ring” to it.

Vale went top with a 1-0 win over MK Dons at Stadium MK, substitute Antwoine Hackford scoring the winner in the 77th minute by turning home Jack Shorrock’s cross.

MK Dons had previously seen two goals disallowed before Vale took charge in the second half.

The win extended Vale’s unbeaten run to seven league games and Moore said: “My focus was to keep our momentum going here today, coming into a difficult arena against a very, very good manager.

“I think Scott Lindsey is a great manager and it was a great time to come to Stadium MK and play them today. You can see his patterns and what he’s working on and he got Crawley promoted last season.

“There’s no doubt he’ll get this football club in the right direction. So it’s three outstanding points today against a real good manager. We take these three points today and move on.

“It’s nice to be 11 games in and speaking about Vale being top of the league. It’s a nice ring and tone to it and it’s brilliant for the fans, but we know as we sit in the month of October that there’s so much work to do. But it illustrates the tremendous work we’ve done over the summer.

“There’s so much work ahead of us. But we have to start from somewhere and continue to work and build and get better.”

MK Dons head coach Lindsey was frustrated as he felt his side did not create enough to test the in-form visitors.

He said: “I’m just really frustrated with the fact we have all the ball and don’t create goal-scoring opportunities.

“Once we went 1-0 down, it looked like then we wanted to try and score, which is disappointing.

“We did a lot of work on it this week and spoke about it in the meeting before the game that we wanted to create.

“We’ve created goal-scoring opportunities in most of the games, but today, we didn’t see that. Even in the end, we’re changing our shape to put two forwards on the pitch to try and create something.

“I didn’t feel like we had any guile or conviction or real aggression to win the game. That disappoints me.

“We will learn and we’ll be better from it because we’ve got good players in that dressing room, but at the moment we need a little bit more personality to come through and aggression to win a game.

“I just feel as if we’re playing football for the sake of playing football and I want to see a little bit more from us.”