A triumph for planning

Latics assistant manager writes for Chron Sport every Friday
OUR two-goal victory at Plymouth was a great result.

We decided to make a couple of changes following the Southampton defeat earlier the same week and travelled south searching for a more solid, professional performance.

We had Ritchie Jones and Warren Feeney back in the starting line-up and the idea was that it would provide us with that little bit more solidity within the team.

It worked for us. In the end, our quality shone through with Chris Taylor — playing out wide on the left wing — setting up the first goal.

Basically, we did what we set out to do which was to give a good, solid, professional performance — to cope with whatever they chucked at us and to follow that by stamping our authority on the game.

From minute one we looked the better team. The only way they were going to score was from a long ball over the top, so it was very, very pleasing.

At Plymouth, we needed Feeney to hold the ball up and get us playing inside their half — and that is exactly what he did.

He provided the platform for our midfielders to step in and play.

And with Jones, he was back to somewhere near where he was at the beginning of the season.

He looked sharp all last week in training after a barren spell in terms of confidence and so we decided to give him a chance.

The fact that Plymouth followed up the game against us by going and winning 3-1 at MK Dons says a lot about just how good a result it was for us at Home Park.

Chris Taylor is a very versatile player. He can play in the 'hole' behind the main striker or on the left and cause defenders problems wherever he is.

He is one of the prime players for us when it comes to exploiting particular weaknesses that we spot in the opposition. More often than not, he is the one we look to.

We are up against Brentford tomorrow and they have some very good players going forward, with Myles Weston on the wing and experienced strikers up front.

I know we beat them 3-1 down there at Griffin Park, but the score flattered us.

They could have been two or three up before we scored. So it is vital that we are on our guard.

We are up against a good side and one that has picked up a lot of good results recently.

If you look back to before the enforced break we had, we were on a run of only one defeat in 10.

We have since slipped a little, for whatever reason, but now we have a run of games where we have to look to get on another streak — especially at home.