Cooper’s boys not out of the woods yet
MARK Cooper said he does not feel his struggling Forest Green Rovers side have quite turned their League Two season round yet despite coming from behind to bag an away win at Stevenage.
Second-half goals from Reece Brown and Christian Doidge saw the visitors claim just their third win of their maiden campaign in the league and their second of the week.
Up until the equaliser, it had been a match Stevenage had been in charge of with Matt Godden’s third goal in two games putting them ahead just before the break.
“I don’t think two good results means that you have turned a corner, but we’ve brought some of the teams above us into play and we’ve set up a lovely game next week against Morecombe,” Cooper said.
“I said the lads at half time “come on, let’s go out and have a go and enjoy ourselves and throw the shackles off ” and to be fair, the players were really good in the second half.”
Stevenage applied the early pressure, but Rovers who the first chance with Keanu Marsh-Brown testing Joe Fryer from distance in the tenth minute.
Ex-Rovers player Jonathan Smith should have put Boro ahead in the 19th minute, but he headed Tom Pett’s corner wide.
It was frustrating for Boro until the 43rd minute when Godden beat the offside trap and ran onto Terence Vancooten’s long ball before converting his shot.
Boro maintained control after the break and substitute Dan Newton nearly doubled the lead, but Doidge cleared his effort off the line.
But the game turned on its head in the 61st minute when Brown squeezed a free-kick from 20-yards out into Fryer’s bottom righthand corner.
This blow was deepened 12 minutes later as Doidge nodded in MarshBrown’s right-wing cross to score for first time in ten games in all competitions.
Godden came the close to equalising, but his injury-time shot was brilliantly tipped over by Bradley Collins.
And Boro’s manager Darren Sarll revealed he was ‘furious’ with how his side played in the second half.
“If you defend like children, you’re going to get punished,” Sarll said. “That lack of defensive quality today has shown up and cost us the game.
“In terms of decision making today, I won’t name names, but the decision making was poor. I really wanted to put a silver lining over a very, very dark cloud from seven days ago at Luton, but we haven’t done that.”