Steve Bould believes his side can take confidence from keeping their first clean sheet of the season in Saturday's 1-0 win over Southampton at Meadow Park.
Tyreece John-Jules scored the game's only goal but Bould was most satisfied with seeing his under-23s record a Premier League 2 clean sheet at the 11th time of asking.
Despite sitting in third and having only lost once this campaign, the under-23s head coach admitted he had been calling on his youngsters to target a first clean sheet in recent weeks.
We spoke to Bould after Saturday's win - and this is what he said:
on the performance…
Overall, I thought it was a very good performance. The nice part for me is getting a clean sheet, we spoke about it for a couple of weeks, and all the lads are delighted that they’ve managed to do that. I think we could have had a few more goals, we got in some dangerous positions but didn’t create a lot of chances from those position which we perhaps should. Tyreece unfortunately missed a penalty and I think they had one glaring chance in the first half, other than that we defended pretty well, so I’m delighted.
on our first clean sheet of the season…
It’s very pleasing for me. At half-time we said we weren’t too bothered if we score two or three more, the important thing is that we keep a clean sheet. It’ll be great for their confidence, the whole team not just the back four. It was a good performance, in the second half they stepped it up a little bit and put us under a lot of pressure so it was a good performance.
on trying to break down a strong Southampton defence…
We spoke about it before the game and we’ve seen them play a few times and they did sit deep and made it difficult. We did open them up a few times but the only disappointing thing was when we got to their final third, we didn’t quite create the chances that we should have done. We may need to work on our crossing this week and the areas to attack but we got there and that’s the pleasing thing.
on recording back-to-back wins in the league…
It’s great for the kids, I keep saying it’s not about winning, it really isn’t, it’s about the performances and I think they’re performing at a good level. If you perform at a good level you then win games and for these kids and their development it’s about performing and trying to do the right things at the right time and hopefully results follow that.
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