Haverfordwest County AFC assistant manager Gary Richards was delighted by the team’s performance as the Bluebirds recorded an impressive 1-0 victory over JD Cymru Premier joint-leaders Cardiff Metropolitan at LHP Stadium on Friday night.

Owain Jones’ goal 10 minutes into the second half was enough to secure the win for the Town, who battled well against a strong and well organised Archers side.

The result lifts the Bluebirds to third place for the time being, as County kept a sixth clean sheet in 10 top-flight outings so far this season.

Here’s what the assistant manager had to say in full after the game:

On the result

We’ll take that. We knew from the start how tough the game was going to be, because that’s the way the first game was. So definitely delighted with the 1-0 win. The first half was very tight. But in the second half we did create a couple of chances. Probably the most disappointing thing second half was that on occasions, we just panicked a little bit, whereas it would have been better to just keep in the ball at times. But listen, sometimes that’s natural when you’re hanging on to a 1-0 lead.

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On the goal

I think Greg’s wrapped it into him [Lee Jenkins] and his first touch has kind of broken the pressure that was coming from one of the Met players. And to be fair, he’s got his head up and produced a little cut back and Ows finished it brilliantly. Obviously Cardiff Met are going to come at us, and put us under loads of pressure, but again we’ve had chances as well, there’s a couple of one on ones, which meant the game could have been over. They had a few good chances as well, but in the end we did really well. When do we ever make the game easier for ourselves? But they did well. Even though we were a little bit disappointed with how easy we gave the ball away at times, we defended quite a few crosses particularly well, because they got into some good areas, but to be fair we’ve defended well, and obviously Zac has made a real good save from a free-kick as well. At times we probably thought would we take a draw, and perhaps we would have at times, but to get the win we’re obviously delighted with it.

On another clean sheet

Defensively we are looking a lot stronger. We’re not giving away as many easy opportunities. These teams are having to work hard, apart from the last goal from Barry – we gave that one away a bit easy – but on the whole we’re making it tough for teams to score against us, which is really important in this league. We get a week to recover now, it’s been a busy couple of weeks, so on to Bala next Friday and try and keep going. We’ll get a couple of training sessions in, and we’ll be ready to go for the long trip to Barlow.

On moving forward

Whatever game we play, we’re confident going into the match, and I think we’ve probably earned that right, but we know how quickly things turn against us. So it’s important we kind of do the basics well and work hard for each other, and make it hard for teams to score against us, and hopefully then we’ve got the firepower up front to win games for us.