Resilient Maidenhead United eye back-to-back wins as Salisbury visit York Road

Ryan Peters applauds the crowd after Saturday’s win over Dagenham. Photo: Darren Woolley

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Maidenhead United host Salisbury tonight (Tuesday) having shown terrific defensive resolve to earn a deserved three points against Dagenham & Redbridge on Saturday afternoon.

The Whites travel to York Road sitting 17th in the table but in decent form themselves, having beaten Chippenham and drawn with Chelmsford City in their last two matches. Prior to that they were narrowly edged out at home by the Magpies’ play-off rivals Chesham United, however, they’ll travel with a degree of trepidation having been thumped 6-0 by United in their last meeting in November.

That was the game which ended a miserable run of six straight defeats in all competitions for the Magpies and came just a day after Alan Devonshire announced he was stepping down from his role.

Maidenhead ran riot that night, with Josh Popoola helping himself to two of the six at the Raymond McEnhill Stadium. They’d love to back up Saturday’s win with a similar display of fluent football tonight but have also shown in recent weeks an ability to grind out results and win ugly.

Saturday wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t quite as ugly as assistant boss Aaron O’Brien described afterwards. It was controlled and authoritative and Maidenhead will need many more performances like this if they’re to finish in the top seven this season and claim a play-off spot.

After the final whistle on Saturday, O’Brien said: “First 30 minutes I thought we played some good stuff and deserved to be 1-0.

“The last 15 minutes they came onto us and made it more difficult. Second half they had more of the possession which we’re not happy with but one thing we’re pleased with this group is that they’re showing massive resilience.

“We did that at Torquay; we did it at Tonbridge and we’ve got another clean sheet today. Clean sheets give you something to build from and I thought there were some excellent performances in the back line today.”

United were also clinical when the chances fell their way on Saturday. They didn’t have loads of them, but Josh Umerah in the 10th minute and Liam Dulson in the 88th minute took their opportunities to seal a 2-0 win over the Daggers. Victory moved the Magpies to within three points of Chesham in seventh place ahead of tonight’s fixtures.

“We’ve also asked Dulson and Umerah for more goals and they’re delivering so fair play to them,” said O’Brien.

“Josh now has two in two and Duls has scored a few recently and we want to get them as high as we can. We’re happy with today, it was a tough game, and they made it difficult for us, but we kept the clean sheet which is one of the most important things.

“We tried to force them wide because we feel we can defend our box. With people like Remy, Barts (Ryan Bartley), David, Will and Manny. We’ve got some great centre halves who’ll win duels and first contacts which is what we want to do. We’ve got a clean sheet and showed resilience, but can we do it for large parts of the game. We want to have more control in games though.

“You can’t always win pretty, but the sign of a good team is one that wins ugly. The best teams do that when they must. Hopefully we don’t do it as much as we need to, but it’s there, we know we can do it, even when we don’t have as much control in games. I’m pleased for the boys.

“We were disappointed after the Farnborough game when we were 2-0 up and we chucked it away. Their conduct and character to come back and do what we did away at Tonbridge and at Torquay and again today, shows you what a great group of players we’ve got.”