Notts County Assistant Manager Greg Abbott felt that his side were good value for their point after a 0-0 draw at Doncaster Rovers on Tuesday night.
Despite coming close through a well-struck effort by Alan Smith that rattled the bar in the first half, Notts had to rely on some staunch defending to take a share of the points at the Keepmoat Stadium, but Abbott felt that his side have shown that they’re capable of that this season.
He said after the game: “I think you’ve seen what we’re all about this season, the way that we’ve defended tonight has been very, very good, it’s the right way to defend.
“If you look at Doncaster’s team on paper, there’s quite a lot of that team that have played in the Championship, they’ve got some really decent players and we’ve had to defend at times with bodies on the line.
“You have to do that sometimes, but we still had the best chance of the game, or came the closest to scoring in the game, when Alan Smith hit the bar, so we take some comfort, it wasn’t all one way traffic.
“Again, we’ve stressed, we’d like to be more of an attacking threat at times, but sometimes you’re only as good as what the opposition let you and fair play to Doncaster, they created the chances and when we did we put our bodies on the line and then Roy behind us has put in a performance that we’re almost getting used to from Roy Carroll.”
The game was overshadowed somewhat towards the end by a bizarre sending off incident that saw match referee Richard Clark show Kwame Thomas a yellow card for what he felt was time-wasting, seemingly not realising that it was a second booking for the on-loan striker and then having to send him off after he’d already left the pitch to be replaced by Billy Daniels.
Abbott said of that incident: “I think, to be fair, in defence of the referee, if he’d have realised it was his second one he would have rushed over and ushered him off without doing the card.
“I’ve never seen a sending off like that. In hindsight, the referee maybe, so late in the game, would have thought twice if he’d have known it was his second.”
Subscribers can watch the full post-match interview with Greg Abbott on Magpie Player.