It was a really important win – Bradford manager Graham Alexander

Graham Alexander felt Bradford were good value for their first league win in seven games – a 1-0 victory against Swindon.

Calum Kavanagh scored his third goal in two games to earn his side an overdue win.

The Bantams had not won in the league since October 19 and were playing their first weekend home game for six weeks.

Boss Alexander said: “The players handled the game really well. It wasn’t fluid but we’ve won a difficult game.

“Our bread and butter is the league and we want to be successful. It was important to take the three points from our first home game for a while.

“We let ourselves down here against Barrow and before that we lost to Doncaster.

“It’s been a while. We wanted to get back on the horse today, win the game, close that gap above us and give ourselves a bit of confidence.

“It was a really important win for myself, the players and the supporters because it’s been a difficult couple of months.

“We spoke about the players we’ve had missing for three months, probably, and then you see them slowly coming back – Ciaran Kelly, Aden Baldwin, Antoni Sarcevic and Alex Pattison.

“You can see the rising quality of the group and the confidence because they see good players coming back.

“If we can keep the squad as strong as it is right now, I believe we’ve got a good chance of consecutive wins.”

Bradford goalkeeper Sam Walker only needed to make one save when he tipped over Gavin Kilkenny’s free-kick four minutes before the home side scored.

The winning goal midway through the first half came after Andy Cook pressed Swindon defender Tunmise Sobowale into a mistake on the edge of the penalty area.

Kavanagh latched onto the loose ball with a shot that Dan Barden parried but he steered home the rebound.

Swindon manager Ian Holloway said: “It’s going to be that sometimes where it will feel like a war of attrition.

“You have to make sure that it is hard to beat you and hard to play against you and I think we did that, other than Tunmise making two mistakes when they scored.

“That changed the game and it lifted their crowd. If we could have scored first then things would have been different.

“When you go one down here it wakes the crowd up and I think the lads did well with that, but we didn’t force them into enough mistakes in their back-line.

“I tried to change it in the second half to get different boys on to be higher and wider but it didn’t work and that happens sometimes.

“I’m not expecting a free-flowing beautiful performance up here. We came here and fought equally with them.”