Clough luck Nige! Three goals will have to do

NIGEL CLOUGH felt his Burton side should have won by an even larger margin at Southend.

The Brewers ended a run of six games without a victory by claiming all three points at Roots Hall.

But Clough thought Burton should have scored more.

“We deserved the victory and I’m just a bit frustrated it got so close at the end because for most of the game our play was good enough to be more than one goal clear,” he said.

“The conditions made it difficult, but I thought we got the ball down and played pretty well for the vast majority of the game.

“We created enough opportunities to score more than three.”

Burton took just four minutes to take the lead as Colin Daniels’ left-wing cross found Lucas Akins at the far post and he fired home an assured volley.

The Shrimpers came close to equalising when Sam Mantom fired against the left-hand post.

But, in the 29th minute, Southend drew back level in bizarre circumstances when a looping effort from Mantom was punched into his own net by Burton goalkeeper Kieran O’Hara.

Burton regained the lead in the 49th minute when Ryan Edwards bundled the ball home after Joe Powell’s driven leftwing cross had been deflected towards his own goal by Joe Shaughnessy.

The Brewers went 3-1 up in the 74th minute with Nathan Broadhead latching onto a poor pass from Southend defender Miles Mitchell-Nelson before teeing up Jamie Murphy to score.

The Shrimpers netted a late reply with John-Joe O’Toole heading Sam Barratt’s long throw into his own goal.

But it was not enough to stop second from bottom Southend suffering a fifth defeat in succession, much to the frustration of boss Sol Campbell who was again forced to field a number of young players.

“I’m not going to dress it up, this is not normal,” said Campbell.

“I’ve not counted how many academy players are playing, but I don’t think many teams in the country have this situation.

“Today we started slowly which is disappointing.

“It took a goal for us to wake up.

“We were on top after the equaliser but we didn’t take the really good chances we had.”