Interview

Ballard - We’re very happy with the clean sheet

Daniel Ballard

Our under-23s extended their unbeaten run to five Premier League 2 fixtures on Friday night - but it’s the clean sheets they are keeping that Daniel Ballard is most satisfied with. 

Our tough-tackling defender made a stunning goal-line clearance against Liverpool with the scoreline at 2-0, allowing us to further our advantage less than 10 minutes later through a blistering counter-attack. 

We spoke to Ballard after the final whistle - and this is what he said:

on the team’s performance…

I think we had to defend for large parts of the game especially early on and we want 2-0 up quite quickly. There were large periods where they had the ball and we were under pressure, so we did really well to keep the clean sheet in the end. 

on their reaction to going under pressure…

I think they were always quite vulnerable especially committing loads of bodies forward as they needed to get the equaliser, so the counter was always on and we’ve got a lot of pace up front with Eddie and Bukayo, so it was an area that we needed to exploit and we did it well.

on his goal-line clearance..

That was very instinctive and we were under a lot of pressure. At that time we knew that if we conceded then it would have been a hard end to the game, so we were all fighting to keep a clean sheet. It was just an instinctive moment and a good clearance in the end.

on extending their unbeaten run to five games...

We’re happier with the clean sheets now because we were letting in a few goals earlier in the season. We’re working hard and trying to keep as many clean sheets as possible, and then letting the attackers go and score the goals. We’re very happy.

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