LABADIE CALLS FOR FULL FOCUS
JOSS Labadie pulled off his own impression of Captain Fantastic with a superb strike to steer his side to within touching distance of the League Two play-offs for the second time in three seasons.
His fourth-minute thunderbolt rocked the would-be champions and forced them to wait another week before taking what would be their first Football League title having already clinched promotion.
Having gone toe-to-toe with the top team in the league, Labadie and Co now turn their attentions to beating a side at other end of the table. Southend are one off the bottom and already relegated and County will head to Essex on Saturday knowing that a point will be good enough to extend their season.
“We just need to stick to our game plan, keep doing what we are doing, put more points on the board and then it won’t matter what anyone else does,” said Labadie.
“We’ll just be concentrating on our game.
“It will be business as usual and we will go there looking for three points.
“They may be down already, but they aren’t just going to roll over for us.
“We have to approach it in the right way and they have already beaten us once this season.
“It has been a tight league throughout the whole season and anyone can beat anyone, but we will go into the last game confident.”
And so they should.
They knocked Cheltenham completely out of their stride to extend their unbeaten run to four games and notch up their highest points tally since rejoining the league as they moved up to fifth place.
Had it not been for a 96th-minute winner for Exeter City at Bolton, they would have been able to relax a bit more this weekend, but Labadie is happy they can go to Southend and do what is required to stay on track for another Wembley appearance.
“We’ve got an amazing group of players who all get along and all fight for each other,” he added.
“It would be the icing on the cake to get into the play-offs and go and make it second time lucky at Wembley.
“It’s an honour for me to be captain at this club and, with a few other senior lads, I need to keep driving on the team. We are confident we can go toe-to-toe with any team in the league.”
A fourth clean sheet in a row was also critical in a performance that was characterised by the non-stop running and closing down by frontrunners Padraig Amond and Lewis Collins.
They forced Cheltenham boss Michael Duff into three formation changes during the game.
Both had good chances to extend the lead and the superb Mickey Demetriou also forced a full-length save from the visiting goalkeeper. It could have been more emphatic, but the result was good enough to keep the bandwagon rolling.
Another victory at Southend would turn this Newport side into the team nobody wants to meet in the playoffs as they continue to recapture the form that kept them near the top of the league for so long in the first half of the season.