Stevenage boss Alex Revell believes his side showed exactly the right response to adversity as they dug in to earn a point on the road following a goalless draw at Wigan in Sky Bet League One.
After being well beaten at Exeter last weekend, Stevenage started brightly and had their best chance inside two minutes when Jamie Reid fired just wide of the far post.
For the rest of the contest, Wigan enjoyed the lion’s share of the game without ever looking like they were going to break the deadlock.
Revell said: “After the disappointment of Saturday, the least you want to leave here with is a point.
“I thought the energy and the intensity and the organisation from everyone was excellent, especially in the second half.
“In the first half, they had a couple of runners in behind, that we maybe could have done better with, but I thought as the game went on we were more in control and kept the ball better.
“Of course, we can do more in terms of creating better chances but this was all about bouncing back from Saturday. This was everything you want in terms of a performance away from home.
“It’s hard when you have the Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday games and you’ve not got long to get information into the players.
“But we all knew that Saturday wasn’t us and it was really important to show an organised performance and to frustrate the opposition.
“I thought they ran out of ideas in the second half, in terms of trying to play forward, and we were intercepting the ball.
“The only thing that was lacking was that first pass…our problems came when we gave the ball away, our shape wasn’t there, and they broke on us.
“We have to improve on that and the players have to believe in themselves more with the ball.”
For Wigan, it was a third clean sheet on the spin but a second successive blank in front of goal.
“Without the ball, I was really, really happy with what we did because they’re quite a tough team to play against,” said boss Shaun Maloney.
“They can get the ball in your box really quickly, really aggressively and we restricted them to one chance early on when they had a set-play.
“With the ball, there was just a little bit of frustration because we’re doing a lot of things pretty good but just not quite enough as a team attacking wise.
“We had nine players who didn’t do pre-season with us and I think you can see that at times, we can definitely get better attacking wise in certain positions.
“We’re only talking small margins in terms of the distances players are between positions but it does have a big impact.
“It was a difficult post-match to speak to the players because I don’t ever want to feel like – and this is not meant as disrespect to Stevenage – you draw 0-0 at home and you’re happy with that.
“You’re never ecstatic to draw 0-0 at home but it was very difficult to be very critical of the players – it’s on me to give them better coaching in that attacking area I think.”
