Grecian boss reacts to Notts County draw
EXETER CITY manager Paul Tisdale was philosophical following the Grecians' draw with Notts County at St James Park on Saturday, but felt that had his side made the most of their pockets of space, they might have come out of the clash with all three points."We always try to go for the three points," Paul said, "but if you're being philosophical about it, Notts County played well and are entitled to go out and try to score. Maybe in recent times, we would have conceded a second today, but we didn't, so there was a positive in there as well. We defended well even after that first goal; it may have been a little bit of a stalemate, but we had a good spell across the last ten minutes, and I could see us pinching it at the end. Essentially we've now taken four points from the week, and I'm reasonably happy that it's been four points from two tricky games.
"In every game, there's things you can focus on and think that you could have done better, and at the same time there's the things you've done well. When you're the home team and you've relinquished an early lead, you do feel the need to push harder, but I thought we played sensibly before starting to go for it in the last twenty minutes or so. We had a very good chance through Arron Davies that the keeper saved very well, but on the other hand, Notts had some danger about them also - Izale McLeod caused us one or two problems on the half-way line by using his pace and power.
"All in all, it was a pretty equal and competitive game - you could say we got away with one or two in the second half, but we could also have score one. Tom Nichols took his goal really well, but it was two different systems against each other. They had an extra man in the middle, so David Noble and Danny Butterfield had their work cut out, but we had pockets of space in front of the defender. Alex Nicholls and David Wheeler did have the ball at their feet often, but we never made the most of those opportunities to find a cross; it was a bit too often for my liking, as we could have capitalised on the advantages of those pockets of space. That would be my only criticism today."