Fleetwood Town captain Nathan Pond spoke emotionally following Saturday’s 2-0 victory over Northampton Town.
The match took place just over 24 hours after the sad passing of Life Vice-President Ted Lowery, a close friend of Pond’s with Ted an ever-present in Nathan’s time at the club.
Here are the key quotes from Pond’s post-match press conference…
On marking Ted Lowery’s legacy with a home win…
“It’s been a while since we won at home. After the bad news we received about Ted, all the lads knew we had to win to honour him. It’s great to get that win and change our home record as well."
On three consecutive clean sheets…
“Everyone is buzzing with back to back wins, and with three clean sheets on the bounce, things are going in the right direction.
“We need to be hard to beat, and we know we had to improve as a team. We know we’ve been conceding too many so this gives confidence. We’ve become a lot better at defending as a team.”
On Kyle Dempsey’s first goal of the season…
“Kyle had a great game today, he’s very energetic and deserved his goal. He’s been saying for a while he wanted to score. We saw at Rochdale that his energy is sometimes too much for other midfields. He has bags of ability and should be scoring more, so hopefully he can take this and continue to score.”
On Cian Bolger’s goal…
“Cian got six or seven last season but it’s been a while since he last scored. Ash came close in the first half too. We caused them a few problems from set pieces today – we had a couple of half chances.”
On hearing about Ted’s passing…
“I got a phone call early on Friday morning and the first thing I thought of was Ted. I then told the lads. It was hard to take as he’s been such a great servant to the club, but as I said, we knew we had to win this today for him.”
On the tributes to him…
“It was very emotional with everything we did, but obviously we had a game of football to play. It was difficult to keep our concentration and we were a bit sloppy at the start of the game, but we cleared our minds and got the result in the end for Ted.”
On AFC Wimbledon away on Good Friday…
“It’s another big game, and a hard one to play in. Wimbledon are a few points behind us so it’s going to be a tough game, so we have to put another good performance in."