Yeovil Town manager Mark Cooper has challenged his team to be be ‘relentless’ in the search for more wins.
The Glovers have gone 12 (twelve) wins in a row across league and FA Cup with a 3-1 win over pre-season title favourites, Torquay on Tuesday night.
Despite a faultless first half, the manager thought they could have caused the Gulls even more damage.
“First half, I thought we were outstanding, I thought we totally controlled the game with the ball, passed and played and created some unbelievable chances, the only frustration for me was that it was 2-0 (at half time) because it’s a crap score line. Because then the mentality at half time is ‘Do we hold what we have?’ or ‘Do we go?’, and I wanted us to go and push and score more, but we went into our shells a bit, and didn’t dominate the ball and gave Torquay encouragement to attack us.
“I’ve just raised that with the players, we have to be braver than that, keep passing the ball and opening chances and go and score four, five and six if we can, rather than be 2-1 and we’re having to make changes and we’re hanging on a bit, with long balls and crosses into the box.”
Goals from former Torquay player (ahem) Frank Nouble and Sonny Blu Lo-Everton, gave the Glovers a 2-0 lead, but the gaffer seemed to suggest he really wanted to see his side dominate the second half as much as the first – but in failing to do so, gave Gary Johnson’s side a chance to get back into the game.
“But, every time we win a game, the pressure intensifies, and you can see the players ‘We’ve got to get over the line” rather than going and expressing ourselves.
(The first two goals were) brilliant plays, pass, move, one-twos, I thought we should have been four up at half time, Murph missed – unlike him – missed a couple of great chances, I thought the game should have been won at half time and like I said, when it’s 2-0 you give a good team a bit of encouragement.
We were negative instead of forward, we stepped backwards in our general play rather than stepping on to them and we were too far away from the ball to get pressure on the shot, he has a free shot and it’s a great strike, but that was just our mentality at the time.”
“Jake told me he always scores at Torquay so it seemed apt to put him on”
But, it was the subs bench to the rescue as Jake Hyde, fresh from replacing Rhys Murphy, nodded home a set piece to put the game beyond doubt.
“Jake told me he always scores at Torquay so it seemed apt to put him on, and Murph put a great shift in on Saturday and Hydey’s come on and got us the goal that’s sealed it.
“They (the fans) were great and so they should be, their team has won twelve on the trot and like I’ve said before, I don’t care what level of football you play at, to win twelve games in a row takes a hell of a lot of doing and full credit goes to the players, they’ve been absolutely magnificent. We want to keep going, I said to them in there, who’s to say you can’t keep going? Go for it, let’s keep going.”
“It’s still only three points, if we got ten points for it, we’d be really, really happy, listen, it’s another three points, we have to keep focused, we have to keep humble and we have to keep working and training hard… the key word for us is relentless and that’s our word that we use everyday.”
You can listen to full interview with Tom Seymour and Mark Cooper Here.