Last weekend, Goalkeeper Jak Alnwick produced a string of fantastic saves to deny Wimbledon for as long as he could.
In the first half, the captain was vital to keeping the score at 0-0, as he made save after save, showing why manager Bruno Ribeiro labelled him the best ‘keeper in League One.
Despite his superb display, he was unable to prevent Wimbledon in the second half and he feels conceding so early in the second 45 hurt his teammates.
He said: “I’m always going to have something to do and I was hoping my first half performance would have been enough to drive the lads forward.
“If you see your captain having a good game it might have driven them on but it didn’t and we conceded at the wrong time and it killed us off and we didn’t have an answer for them.”
The Vale side has been tested in recent weeks, with many of the senior players in the side out at the moment such as; Anthony Grant, Sam Foley, Jerome Thomas, Adam Yates and Ben Purkiss.
This has saw a lot of the younger players come in to the side and against Wimbledon, there was just two players over 23 in the starting eleven.
Alnwick is confident that these younger players can continue to improve and will be helped by the return of the senior players in the upcoming weeks.
“It’s frustrating, I wouldn’t say any of the lads didn’t try especially this group of lads, we tried but it just wasn’t enough.
“But, we will come up with a solution between the staff and the players and I’m sure we will work it out.
“We’ve got a lot of young lads here and we have the core of our team missing at the moment.
“I think once we get them back the younger lads can learn from them and I think we will do ok; we just need to get our heads up and work hard going forward.”