06.12.08 Newtown AFC 2 Carmarthen Town 3

Mark Aizlewood acknowledged the importance of the win. He told 'Y Dre ar Y We', “An absolutely vital win. We knew following Friday night’s results that that if we got a result here it would put us right in the frame – I think we’re joint fourth now. An important win as well because I thought we gave them two goals but managed to come in at half time 3-2”.

“I told the players at half time that a good team will put that 45 minutes, when we gave them two goals, behind them and the worst result we would get would be a 3-2 victory.

“I thought in the second half again our fitness levels were absolute credit to the players, they were magnificent. Everybody against us now is tiring the last 20 minutes. It would have been nice to get a goal in the last 20 minutes just to relax everybody, we didn’t get that, but we thoroughly deserved the victor”.

Aizlewood was pleased with performances, “Palmer was magnificent and so was  Richard Hughes with some great last ditch tackles when we needed him. Nathan Cotterrall made good decisions throughout the game as did Sacha Walters and Stuart Roberts who gave us momentum and got us through the first half. But more importantly it was a good victory today for good team spirit and good team work”.

The Richmond Park boss agreed with his coach. “It was a tight game. We always knew it was going to be difficult, there are some big sides that have come to Latham Park over the last few months and haven’t got results – Haverfordwest, Aberystwyth , TNS all failed to win”.

“Credit to everyone in the squad today, because that’s what it was a squad performance. We stuck at it, we gave a couple of sloppy goals away which made things difficult but we showed great character in turning it around and coming from behind twice before then getting a winner”.

“It was a really, really pleasing performance with the effort that went into it and I always felt that we were going to score goals”.

Brace felt Town had conceded easily. “They were both sloppy goals we could have done an awful lot better with .unfortunately now and again you do concede goals like that the good thing was today was that it didn’t cost us the result because we were good enough at the other end to get ourselves out of it”.

And why did the killer goal evade Town’s grasp? “A little bit of bad luck, a little bit of hard luck, a little bit of poor finishing and some scrambled defence from Newtown. But sometimes these things happen. We said at half time if we’re not quite good enough to score a fourth goal lets make sure that they are not good enough to score a third, which was the case”.

Now three games undefeated how was placed Town for the Christmas run in? “We’ve sneaked up on everybody. I think after the loss to Welshpool people were probably writing us off. We knew ourselves that we needed to show a little bit more consistency and that’s what we’ve done over the last three games. We’ve got ourselves on a little bit of a run and we’ve got to make the most of it now”. 

What was Brace hoping for over the Christmas period? I hope Santa is going to be generous and give me maximum point in every game!! Seriously I’m looking for players to carry on their form, the way that they’ve been playing and their attitude into each game over Christmas. If they do that we can’t ask for much more. Whether the results go our way or not the boys are really, really doing what we’re asking for and when they do that you can’t go over the top, you can’t ask for anything else”.

Having come on himself with six minutes to go what was the thinking behind the manager’s move? “It is a squad game which is why Hudgy and Tim were left out today. Not because of form but because we needed other people to have games. The lads understand that and over the Christmas period it will happen again to certain individuals”.

“We looked at Danny’s fitness in terms of he hadn’t played for a couple of weeks and we felt that in the last fifteen minutes he was tiring a little bit so it was a case of getting me on, fresh legs and putting Sacha up front. Obviously there was an element of just calming things down which I like to think happened. The last ten minutes we saw the game through without any real major panics”.

Brace was impressed with his former team mate Darran Ryan’s outfit “In all fairness they had a huge work ethic which impressed me an awful lot. The two lads up front Mitchell and Cooke they are very, very honest. They caused us as many problems as any other strikers who get a lot of credit. They’ve got the added threat of Moses coming on from the bench which we always knew was going to happen and I felt we were lucky enough and strong enough to cope with it”.

“Overall it’s been a massive team performance for Town”.

Deryn's Dugout