CAREY TOO MUCH FOR COBBLERS
PLYMOUTH have become Northampton’s bogey team of late and after Graham Carey inspired the visitors to a comfortable victory, Cobblers boss Chris Wilder admits he is alarmed by the gulf between the promotion favourites.
Carey pounced on a mistake by Ryan Watson shortly before half-time to slot past Northampton ‘keeper Adam Smith and score his third goal in four league games.
The playmaker has proven a shrewd signing since joining from Ross County in the summer and underlined his all-round talents by providing the corner that led to Jake Jervis’ goal on 71 minutes.
The hosts offered little in reply as their misery was compounded in a sending off for Josh Lelan in stoppage time after a clumsy tackle on Craig Tanner resulted in a second yellow card. Argyle have now won the last five meetings between the sides and after falling to back-to-back defeats this week, Wilder insists his side need to improve quickly if they are to sustain a promotion bid.
“Watson has made a bad mistake on the halfway line for the first goal and Carey has gone through to score and capitalise on it,” said Wilder. “But after that I don’t think we deserved to get anything out of the game.
“We lost a lot of belief very quickly, which is disappointing. I think from back to front we were very poor and our work off the ball wasn’t very good.
“The opposition were a lot better than us, and they well and truly deservedly beat us.
“We made really bad decisions and played the way that we really don’t want to play at this football club.
“If we had still been sat here till six or seven o’clock, we wouldn’t have got anything out of the game, and if we had then we wouldn’t have deserved too.”
Leicester loanee Watson was dispossessed on 39 minutes by Carey on halfway, with the Plymouth summer signing racing through to give the Pilgrims the lead.
With 20 minutes left Plymouth doubled their lead as Carey’s corner caused confusion in the Northampton defence and Jervis poked the ball into the bottom corner from close range.
Lelan then saw red in added time to complete a comfortable afternoon for the visitors, with manager Derek Adams’ only concern being an appar- ent hamstring injury to Reuben Reid after 15 minutes.
“It was a very professional performance from start to finish, we could have scored more, and we scored some good goals,” said Adams.
“I’m not sure about the injury to Reuben Reid, he just signalled to the bench that he needed to come off.
“It was a good team performance, the back four were excellent and we worked hard to keep another well deserved clean sheet.
“I’ve just looked at the result and not the whole table just yet but we need to just keep moving along.”