David Artell believes that our encouraging performance against Blackburn Rovers in the FA Cup restored some confidence in the players to go on and defeat Crawley 3-0 at the weekend. Although Crewe were narrowly beaten 1-0 by Rovers and exited the FA Cup at the second round stage, he was pleased with our overall performance against a quality League One side.

The Crewe Alexandra boss believes that his team took that into Saturday’s home win over Harry Kewell’s Red Devils.

“I thought we played some good football on Wednesday against a very good Blackburn side and we managed to take that into Saturday”, said Artell.

“After a cagey 20 minutes where we lacked a bit of belief we turned the screw and we deserved to win the game. We scored some good goals and our game management was good. We managed to get a clean-sheet and saw the game out well.

“Now we have to build on that result and repeat it against Swindon. That’s the challenge. We cannot keep having flashes in the pan. We need to back up one result with another and target being more consistent.

“The consistency you show usually defies where you are in the league.”