Match report posted by John_ (view the full thread on the forum
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Just a quick summary regarding Tuesday's 4-1 victory over Stockport. The overall scoreline pretty much sums up the performance.
Unusually for Town, we started off extremely brightly. In recent games at the County Ground we've often come out of the blocks stumbling but there was no sign of this as we took the game to our bottom-of-the-table visitors.
Stockport had actualy won their previous match - 1-0 at Exeter - their first win since October apparently.
Danny Ward broke the deadlock early on. From a corner the ball found its way over to the Bolton loanee who fired in a shot through a few defenders and although Fon Williams got a hand on it, there was too much power and the ball found the back of the net.
Following on from this Billy Paynter had a few shots from outside the box. Both efforts went narrowly wide with the keeper at full stretch.
Up the other end, Sean Morrison, deputising for the the injured Gordon Greer was having his own personal battle with Ibehre. The youngster did well throughout. In fact he made a last ditch sliding tackle to dispossess a Stockport forward as he was about to pull the trigger in a rare counter.
We got our second goal on the stroke of half-time. Billy Paynter following up to prod home from an acute angle as Fon Williams failed to hold onto a cross-shot from the left.
By this stage Ward had been replaced by Ritchie - on loan from Portsmouth. The lad was adequate enough but looked a bit rusty at times.
Annoyingly we let Stockport back into the game in first half stoppage time. Morrison was adjudged to have fouled someone just outside the box. It looked an unbelievably soft decision in my eyes. More infuriatingly I knew exactly what was going to happen. Tansey curled a beauty around the wall into the bottom corner. 2-1. I thought Lucas should have been more alert to his position and the position of the wall.
The first quarter of the second half was a bit tense. Stockport sensing they could get something dominated the ball in our half without really doing anything constructive with it. We dealt with this comfortably enough but we needed another goal to wrap this game up. With 20 to go, McGovern crossed in for Simon Ferry to head home and the job was done.
Shortly after, with Stockport's capitulation more or less complete Paynter scored what looked a beauty from 20+ yards but having seen the highlights it took a very favourable deflection off a defender before hitting the back of the net.
All in all it was job done.