Evo Stik North
Ossett Town manager Grant Black. Picture: Mark Gledhill
Grant Black hailed his Ossett Town players for showing the character required to end their six-match losing streak.
The deserved 3-1 victory at Brighouse Town on Boxing Day ended the slump, the first since Black swept through the doors at Ingfield in February 2016.
“Questions” were hanging over his players following the 6-0 home defeat to Prescot Cables on Saturday and Black admits his players answered.
“It is a massive three points because we needed to respond after Saturday’s result which was obviously disappointing,” Black told Non League Yorkshire.
“Going down to nine men against a team like Prescot, you are always going to struggle.
“It wasn’t a performance that we associate with Ossett Town since we have come in. We have been on a bit of a bad run, there’s no hiding from it.
“But I think that sometimes can do people good because you don’t get above your station and think we are better than what we are and that we got to the play-offs last year that we have a divine right to win every game.
“The players realise that and there has been questions asked about them all. ‘Have they got desire?’ ‘Do they want to play for us?’
“They are questions you have to answer when you’re losing games and I think we need to build on that performance (against Brighouse).
“It was a good performance. Brighouse are where they are, but they are a good team and they make it difficult for you.
“We asked the lads to step up and put in a performance and they did that.”
The only negative at Brighouse was the dismissal of young starlet Kai Hancock who will now miss three matches from next week after being sent off for a lunge on Iwan Heeley.
The red card was Ossett’s fourth in four matches. Issac Assenso and Anthony Mackie were sent off in the defeat to Prescot Cables and are banned from Saturday.
Danny South was red carded at Trafford at the beginning of the month. He returns on Saturday at Droylsden.
Some would say there was a discipline problem, but Black says that’s not the case and explained why.
“There’s definitely no lack of discipline,” he said.
“I expect people to go in for tackles. If Kai hadn’t gone in for that tackle, he would have come off worse, as would have Anthony Mackie on Saturday.
“Both could have been arguably a yellow card.
“It is desire. The red cards haven’t been for kicking out or dissent. It is lads going in for 50/50 balls and getting a couple of bad decisions.”
Apart from an equaliser for Brighouse close to half-time, Ossett had it pretty much their own way.
Jason Yates’ opener was cancelled out, but goals from Hancock and Assenso won it for Town in the second half.
Black said: “We said we were comfortable at half-time (even though it was 1-1).
“It was unlike me not to go berserk because we conceded. But you take the goal out of it and it was a really good first half performance.
“It was important the lads knew that. We just have to make teams work harder to score against us and sometimes we don’t.
“But when we got it to 3-1, we weren’t really troubled. When we went down to ten men, we set up a little differently for the last ten minutes just to try and encourage them to go long.
“They did and we were able to nullify them.”