Matt Taylor has claimed that his Bristol Rovers side took a play-off team in Barnsley to the wire as they were beaten 2-1 at Oakwell on Saturday afternoon.
The hosts started the much stronger of the two outfits and got their rewards as debutant Davis Keillor-Dunn fired past Josh Griffiths to hand the Reds the lead with the goalkeeper called upon on a couple of occasions to keep the scoreline down.
However, Rovers started to grow into the game and found their equaliser late in the half as Ruel Sotiriou capitalised on an error in the Barnsley back line to take the ball around goalkeeper Gabriel Slonina and slot home into an empty net for his first Gas goal.
The visitors started the second half the better of the two sides too but fell to defeat as Adam Phillips headed home a cross in the 65th minute.
“We’ve took a play-off team to the wire, if not more today,” Taylor said post-match. “There’s not much in that game. They were the better team for the first 20 minutes but from that point on I was really pleased with our performance.
“We have to understand where they are. They had a little bit more nous and experience on that pitch than us. A few more league minutes, so to speak. We’ve got to improve certain aspects. We’re a fit team but we do get gassed sometimes, we do blow our legs, so you’ve got to effect it from the bench, of course you have. But I want that to happen at a later stage in the game.
“I thought it was a really good game of football,” the Gas manager added. “Two teams who really went at each other. They started better than we did. We were second best in too many areas to start the game in terms of our speed of thought into our speed of movement so we had to chase the first 20 minutes of the game.
“But from that point on I thought we improved, controlled the better side of the footballing aspect but there’s always a physical approach which we never got a handle on all day.”
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