Stevenage boss happy following first league victory of the season

Graham Westley says both he and his coaching staff have been like chefs in a kitchen in recent weeks trying to come up with the correct ingredients to create a recipe for success.

Stevenage’s first win of the League 1 season – and their first win in eight matches if you count the three defeats and one draw that came at the end of last season – came on Saturday with James Dunne’s late strike at Notts County, and afterwards Westley said a solid defensive display gave his side the platform for victory.

“We’ve not been winning, and obviously when you’ve not been winning that’s for a reason so we’ve been puzzling what we might do differently,” Westley said after Saturday’s victory.

“I’ve said in the last couple of weeks it’s not been far away. It’s all about the margins, football, and last weekend was a much-improved performance in possession, as opposed to the awful possession performance we put in at Swindon.

“We know what it takes to win football matches and when you’re working with a new squad you’ve got to try and gel enough of the right qualities into the team.

“We as a management have been like cooks in a kitchen trying to work out the ingredients to see who can do what for us and today was a lot better and at least we’re making some progress.

“We won’t get carried away with winning with the sense that we know it was a weakened side from their point of view, they had four big players missing.

“You could tell from the way that Chris was talking before the game – he was talking about them trying to win four or six points in the next two games which is as good as saying ‘we’d be happy with the draw today’.

“We could see where they were at, and we tried to take advantage of that and get on top of the game early.

“We put in a solid away performance. We made it our business to grind it out and give ourselves the chance of a goal going forward but giving nothing away defensively.

“I thought we were robust, I thought we were solid and strong and it was a typical Stevenage performance away from home.”