Forward Richie Bennett was left with mixed emotions following yesterday’s away trip to Salford City, after scoring his first goal for the club but the team failing to come away with all three points.
The striker, who joined the club from Carlisle United over the summer, was able to open his Port Vale account just four minutes after entering the pitch, drilling the ball past Chris Neal with 10 minutes to go, and he thought he had won the game for his side.
However, the joy of what was a special and confidence boosting goal for Bennett, in front of the 1,400 travelling fans, was soured by the late equaliser conceded which prevented Vale getting their first win of the season.
Positively looking back over the game, Bennett said that despite the disappointment of conceding another late goal, the game has continued to develop the strong base that the squad are building from going forward.
He said: “It’s always nice to get the first one [goal] out of the way, get that monkey off your shoulder, it’s good to get the confidence going but disappointing that we didn’t get the three points overall.
“It’s bitter-sweet I think, you go 1-0 up and there’s what five, ten minutes left of the game, you think that’s it, just keep a clean sheet and you come off with three points.
“So yeah disappointment, but you know we’ve got something to build on there, we know from the three points we’ve got we’ve got confidence to go on and build on that.”
One area to improve on is chance conversation according to Bennett, who highlighted the importance of taking your chances in League Two, or teams will punish you for it as has happened so far this season.
The draw, which Bennett described as feeling like a loss to the players, has left the squad with an even greater drive, and if they can channel that aggression towards a good performance against Forest Green Rovers they can get the win.
It’s key in the mind of Bennett that they combine that desire with the confidence gained from being able to control the game against a side like Salford and move forward positively towards Tuesday night and fight for another three points.
He said: “It’s something to improve on, but it’s given us confidence knowing that we can go at teams and get at teams, so we’ve got to take some positives out of it and we’ve got to build on that.
“I think aggression in the right manner is key, I think we’ve shown today that a team like Salford, with what they’ve got, that we can go 1-0 up and we need to cancel them errors out.
“We’ve got to take all the confidence from today and go in, with what we’ve done, positives today, and take them into Forest Green, without the goal.”