STILL LIFE IN THE MAD DOG YET!
BARNET guaranteed that the League Two season will go down to the wire as they picked up a vital win at Morecambe thanks to Alex Nicholls’ late winner.
In a result that sees the Shrimps still needing one point to secure their Football League status Barnet’s victory gives them a fighting chance of safety when relegation looked certain a few weeks ago until Martin Allen took over from Graham Westley.
Allen has turned the Bees’ fortunes around and with performances like this, it is easy to see why.
He said: “We have some good players at this club - no doubt about it - and we will be doing everything we can to make sure we stay in the league.
“We worked too hard as a club to get back into the league a couple of years ago and we have to do all we can not to let it slip.
“We have another game at home next week and it is a massive one for the club and we just have to go and smash it.’'
“Everyone put a shift in and we dominated out there. We thought if we kept going as we were, an opportunity would come our way and in the end, it was a brilliant goal that won us the game.
“After we scored, all our players put their heads in their way and the bodies on the line ,and we went on to pick up a vital win, which I knew we would get.”
Morecambe boss Jim Bentley was left frustrated as his side failed to score for the third game running and failed to take the point they needed for safety.
He said: “When we needed to come up trumps, we didn’t, and no players really came out of the game with any credit. It was always going to be a tight game but we lacked composure in the final third, which has been the story of our season.
“There were times when looked easier to set up a scoring opportunity but we put in a sloppy pass.
“In the end, the only quality we saw in the game was their goal and that is what mattered.”
Nicholls scored the only goal of the game late on as he took advantage of a neat lay-off on the edge of the area to arrow a volley an effor past home shot-stopper Barry Roche. Roche had earlier kept Morecambe in the game with fine saves from a Richard Brindley free kick and a John Akinde strike. It was a very different in the first half. Morecambe twice looked set to hit Barnet, for whom midfielder Dan Sweeney shone, on the break but on both occasions, a lack of quality cost them. Adam McGurk failed to find Callum Lang when he was spare in the box before Campbell did exactly the same after a quick counter-ttack. That lack of a killer instinct proved fatal as the Bees stung their opponents late on.