Shaymen spirit was key, says Cooper

Assistant manager Andy Cooper praised the fighting spirit of The Shaymen after their 2-1 win against Kidderminster, writes Tom Scargill.

Town moved into the top seven thanks to Milli Alli's match-winning brace, which sealed only Halifax's second home win of the season.

Asked if he felt it had been a deserved victory, Cooper told the Courier: "On the balance of play I think it was fairly even.

"The chances they created in the first-half, especially earlier on - we wanted to come out of the blocks firing a lot more than we did.”

He added: "It took us a while to settle into it.

"We made a tweak to our shape and it took maybe a little bit more time to adjust but I thought as soon as we got to grips with it, we were able to get a bit more of a foothold in the game.

"It was a case of being solid when we didn't have the ball and then being able to break free and try to catch them on the counter-attack.

"All in all, I think we've created chances and we've defended our box well at times.

"Obviously we're disappointed to concede through a set-piece, especially after taking the lead, that's really tough and something we pride ourselves on.

"We know how they set-up but we just didn't quite execute how we've been working on it, but we did in the second-half when we needed to dig deep.

"A really evenly-fought contest with opportunities for both teams, maybe they had the best of the opportunities, but I'm just pleased we got the three points."

Cooper admitted Town needed to dig in at times to record a muchneeded home win.

"We needed to send a message here at home that we wanted to graft and do whatever we could for the three points," he said.

"We spoke at half-time about whether we could get the tempo with the all a bit quicker, could we keep hold of it for longer spells higher up, and that'd give us chance to reset and get into a better shape so we didn't get counter-attacked on, where a couple of their chances came from in the first-half.