Striker returns from toe injury to fire Boro to victory against Swindon as the fight for survival hots up

Lucas Akins says Stevenage will do everything in their power to pull themselves up from bottom of the league to safety come the end of the season.

The striker scored the first of his side’s two goals in their 2-0 win over Swindon Town this evening, a low shot right into the bottom corner of Wes Foderingham’s goal six minutes before the break.

Speaking after the match, which also saw Filipe Morais net from the penalty spot in the second half, the former Tranmere Rovers man, who made his last start for the club in the FA Cup win over Stourbridge at the start of December, said: “Obviously the boys have worked incredibly hard for each other. That’s one thing now until the end of the season that we know we’re going to give.

“We’re definitely going to be the hardest working team against any team that we come up against – that’s always going to give us half a chance. When we get the chance to play we’ll try to do that as well.

“We are where we are for the moment but I don’t envisage us staying there and neither do the lads. We’ve got to work incredibly hard now to get out of this situation.

“It was an important game. We’ve got a run of games coming up now that are obviously very important and it’s vital that we pick up maximum points, especially at home.

“We have to make this place a bit of a fortress from now until the end of the season, so it’s a good start to the sequence of games that we’ve got coming up.

“The gameplan that we went out to do, we executed it very, very well. It was a bit similar to how we played away at their place in the second half [of the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy defeat in December].

“Swindon are a fantastic side but we wanted to get about them and we managed to do that in both halves and we managed to get a goal in each half and it was pleasing.

“We wanted to win the first half and we wanted to win the second half and we managed to do that, and keep that clean sheet.

“You saw people chucking their bodies on the line and blocking stuff, [Chris] Day has pulled off some fantastic saves which don’t go unnoticed. The boys are pulling together and we have to keep doing that now.”

Akins returned to the side following a toe injury which he picked up in a substitute appearance at Swindon on December 10. Since then he has made two more appearances off the bench but now hopes that the injury is behind him.

“It was against Swindon at their place in the cup that I did it, and it split. It’s something I’ll just have to live with now.

“You don’t want to be missing games over that. It was affecting the way I ran, but tonight I didn’t feel it. It’s healed a lot more so I’m not really worried about it now and hopefully I can build on that.”