The hosts put three past league leaders Crawley Green and with that, firmly put the loss at Dunstable to the back of fans’ minds. After the game, a rightfully positive Lee Bircham broke down the evening’s match up.
“Without a doubt, that was our best performance of the year. We didn’t get it all our own way, either. We absolutely battered them for the first 20 minutes. Got a goal, got another one. We took a little sucker punch. Silly goal at a corner, 1-1.
You could see there just crept in a little bit of self-doubt, but they had no right. They were head and shoulders. Alright, it finished 3-1 but even they’ll admit that’s a 3-1 thrashing. It was a really good performance and a lot of boys come out of that with a lot of credit tonight.”
In this Spartan fixture, there was a real onus on creative wing play. Shifting formations, Lee Bircham talked through his thinking regarding the involvement of key men Kwai Marsh-Brown and debutant Reece Robins.
“You don’t fix something that isn’t broken and to be fair we’ve had a formation that’s worked all year. The two up front have been absolutely phenomenal and they’ve been our best two players. Whatever we did from there is around the two up front. Unfortunately, Lewis got injured on Saturday. He’s struggling with it, so that just gave us that opportunity to change the shape.
It doesn’t really matter what shape we played tonight really because the boys were on it. You could see the attitude in the changing room was just like ‘let’s win today’. The shape was great. It worked for us. Big mention to Kwai because he’s been around this place for a couple of months now waiting for an opportunity. He’s hung around, he came on Saturday. He had an impact. Signing Reece, he was phenomenal. What a great kid, only 19. He’s got a very bright future. His family are QPR fans too, which is a massive, massive plus!”
Another point from this one was Leighton’s latest injury struggle. Recent weeks have seen the involvement of development players from the bench. Others have also stepped up well.
“We had seven to eight injured or unavailable tonight. Not just squad players, players that would’ve played. That makes today’s result even more pleasing. We only really had the two lads we brought on and young Josh who’s done well as well. He’s put himself in the frame now, Joshua Hatton. It was a real good response. I’m really pleased.”

Article By Max Bradfield