David Artell hailed his side’s 1-0 win at Victoria Park as a ‘really professional performance’ as the club progressed into the second round of the EFL Cup. Callum Ainley netted the only goal of the game four minutes into the second half to see the 10 men into round two.

Young defender Billy Sass Davies was shown a straight red card for a professional foul after just 12 minutes. It looked like Sass Davies had clearly had his shirt pulled first as he tussled for possession with Tyler Burey but his pull on his saw him dismissed.

Following a hard fought 1-0 win, David Artell told the club’s official web-site: “I thought it was a thoroughly professional away performance in testing circumstances. When you lose a man so early in the game from a wrong decision then you are really up against it.

“You have to overcome it and to a man we were magnificent. I cannot remember them having too many chances and that is testimony to how well we played. They put a lot of crosses into our box but that doesn’t equate to chances in my book.

“We showed a real mental resolve and we had a few chances to score a second in the end. The one criticism I have is that we tried to score that second goal and committed people forward when we didn’t need to.

“I thought other than that our game management was good. By game management I don’t mean time wasting and to a man, we stood up to the challenge. It’s about keeping the ball when you need to keep the ball and we did that. We took the sting out of the game.

“The linesman at half time said I saw the pull on Billy (Sass Davies) so I said to him ‘why didn’t you give it then?’. He ducked out of the decision for me and the referee couldn’t get it out quickly enough.

“I thought Billy was too honest there and you have to buy the foul.

He added: “We had to sacrifice Chris Long and that was a consequence of that and that was disappointing because we wanted him to get some minutes under his belt after recovering from Covid.”