Burton ‘need to back up’ surprise win at Peterborough

Burton interim manager Tom Hounsell wants his struggling side to back up the performance that earned a shock 1-0 victory at Peterborough.

The Brewers arrived at the Weston Homes Stadium off the back of being knocked out of the FA Cup by non-league Tamworth last Sunday, bottom of League One and 10 points adrift of safety.

But they belied their poor form and lowly position by being the better team on the night as Mason Bennett’s goal deservedly earned what was only Burton’s second league win of the season.

Hounsell said: “The one thing I demanded from the players was character and I think we got that today – in fact we demanded that at the weekend, so the bottom line is we needed to put in a performance.

“I’m just pleased that the players did that today because there’s huge belief in this group.

“If the players work hard in training, they’ll get an opportunity and I’m just pleased the players that came into the squad performed to the level that they did.

“They really were tremendous, but equally I thought all of the players, particularly for the first 45 minutes, produced their best performance of the season.

“The discipline that we showed out of possession and our attacking threat from transition was really positive, so I’m hugely happy with the performance, I’m happy with a really important win.

“But we need to back that up (against Wrexham on Saturday).”

Burton had the better chances and came close either side of half-time through Tomas Kalinauskas’ long-range effort and a Ryan Sweeney header that went just wide.

The Brewers finally had their reward after 64 minutes when Kalinauskas’ pass put Bennett through and he calmly finished beyond Peterborough goalkeeper Nicholas Bilokapic.

Peterborough boss Darren Ferguson said: “They’re not robots where you can just tune them in and see the same thing every night.

“It’s an unusual performance from us because generally there have been a lot of goals, a lot of attacks – a few too many for the opposition, but we’ve been very entertaining.

“The deficiency has been, obviously, us conceding too many goals and tonight it was basically a very, very poor performance, we can’t get away from that.

“When you have poor performances like that, you’ve just got to try and find a way of scraping a result and of course we again give away a really sloppy, poor goal.

“And that is a big pivotal moment in the game that then gives them something to hang on to, which they did very well.

“The goal was awful and if I’m going to be honest, I couldn’t really see us scoring and for us that’s unusual.”