Darrell Clarke highlighted his side’s impressive first-half performance after Barnsley cruised to a 3-0 home victory over Crawley.
Jon Russell broke the deadlock for the Tykes before Max Watters and Davis Keillor-Dunn added second-half strikes.
Clarke said: “The performance for 65-70 minutes was fantastic; lots of chances, which we should’ve finished more of, and then a really sloppy final 20 minutes, but I’ll cut the boys a bit of slack on that.
“There were some changes, we were looking after minutes. I’ve had to be careful with Josh Earl and Donovan Pines.
“Marc Roberts is just coming back too, so there are a lot of reasons why we maybe lost that flow in the final 20 minutes.
“Ben Killip has had to pull a couple of saves off, but let’s focus on the positives. Four wins out of four, it’s great for the boys to respond in that way and also to make sure that we haven’t picked up any more injuries, because four games in 10 days is absolutely ridiculous.”
On his side’s early opener, Clarke said: “I thought we were really strong in the first half. I can’t remember Ben Killip having to do anything. We were on the front foot, the press was right, they couldn’t play through us or over us.
“We just need to be a bit more composed in the final third to create more chances. We said to the boys at half time that we needed to start again brightly and put the game to bed and we did that to a certain extent.”
Crawley manager Rob Elliot was disappointed with his side’s display.
He said: “They started exactly how we’d said they would in terms of their energy and running so we should have been more prepared for that and ultimately in the first half we had no intensity or intent.
“We played into their hands. We built into the game over a 25-30 minute period but we weren’t as effective as we should’ve been.
“Coming in at 1-0 we changed a couple of things and actually felt positive going into the second half, but you can’t start a game of football like that in League One and you can’t then start playing when you’re 3-0 down.
“It’s too late by then. It’s not acceptable to be 3-0 down and then start playing and running in behind.
“Yes, we changed players but you’ve got to do it for the first 60 minutes to even have a chance in the game and we didn’t do that today.
“We are in a proper battle, we know that. We need players and people that are up for the battle and are going to give absolutely everything in every moment regardless of the game, regardless of the quality.”
