(Image: Prosports Images- Wayne Tuckwell)
Steve Cotterill says Forest Green Rovers 1-0 National League win over Hartlepool United on Saturday was achieved by the entire squad after a difficult week on the road.
Rovers earned the only goal of the game on 71 minutes through Charlie McCann’s fourth goal of the season sweeping an Emmanuel Osadebe pull-back into the bottom corner.
It was a return to The New Lawn and winning ways for Cotterill’s side following after two lengthy away days last week starting with a 2-0 win over Gateshead last Saturday before suffering a 1-0 defeat at Oldham Athletic on Tuesday.
“I’m delighted with the three points. When you’ve got that three game week, doing a lot of travelling, the players sometimes have a come down which we don’t normally have an issue with because there is no time to come down.
“We’ve just had, what I would call, a really tough few games away from home and it was very emotional in those games going from a good win to a defeat that you feel isn’t one.
“Today it wasn’t the team that won that game, it was the squad, their spirit, their energy and their effort,” Cotterill said.
Rovers started to find their flow following a raft of substitutions on 66 minutes which saw Marcel Lavinier and Emmanuel Osadebe make instant impacts.
Lavinier charged down the right before playing a cute back-heeled pass into the path of Osadebe who carried it past two Pools defenders before picking out McCann with a precise cutback, but Cotterill didn’t want to take too much credit for their impacts.
“I’m not patting myself on the back for those. You can make a million and one subs, which I’ve done throughout my managerial career, and some of them work and some of them don’t.
“People may think it doesn’t matter to me, but it does when I have to leave players out of the team. I love all of those boys in there and I don’t want to hurt them when they’re not in the team.
“I’ll do anything for those lads and that’s the relationship we have.
“Being brutally honest, without the subs going on today I don’t think we win that game,” he said.
Osadebe almost doubled Rovers lead late in the game, but his left footed driven effort was superbly denied by Pools goalkeeper, Brad Young which caught his manager by surprise.
“Manny’s [Osadebe] has got a really good left foot actually. I didn’t really know how good his left foot was until this season.
“We were doing some set plays in training the other day and we needed a left footer on something, and he said, ‘I’ll take that’ and I didn’t know how he’d do on that.
“It would have been a fantastic goal if Manny had scored it but if he had scored it before he took those set-pieces, I would have been surprised but after seeing them, he could be left footed you know,” Cotterill said.
Forest Green now have a week’s break before they travel to Eastleigh on Saturday October 5th for another testing National League fixture.