Chris Hogg hails Northampton ‘mindset’ in win over Colchester

Northampton boss Chris Hogg identified a ‘big difference in mindset’ from his players during their 2-0 home win over Colchester.

The home side started well at Sixfields and led inside 10 minutes when Matty Warhurst headed in Lee Evans’ cross.

Colchester missed a couple of good chances to level before Sam Hoskins poked in a second after half-time, and Northampton then coasted to victory.

“I’m delighted and I’m absolutely over the moon for the players,” said Hogg. “Some of the recent performance levels have been closer to what we want, especially on Tuesday night [against Tranmere] even though we didn’t get the result.

“Belief and confidence are huge but we have to shift the mindset at this club. I say it every day to the players – we have to stop playing football games to lose, we have to play to win.

“I thought you saw a team today that played to win rather than one that played not to lose and that’s a big difference in mindset. All I want us to do is play to win and that means playing forward and running forward.

“It wasn’t perfect but we were solid and hard to beat and if you look at the week, six points and two clean sheets, it’s a solid building block for us.

“It’s been a really positive week to build the belief, and it was great to see how much the fans got behind the team. I have to apologise to them because I’m not really a fist bump type of manager but I will always show my appreciation for their support.”

Colchester remain without a win since August, a run of nine league games.

Boss Danny Cowley said: “We made a really poor start. We didn’t get out of the blocks, we didn’t make any tackles and we didn’t compete.

“We conceded a really soft first goal. Northampton’s number nine [Matty Warhurst] is a good player but a young boy and he got between our two big aerial defenders and scored at the near post.

“A poor start, then a good response, but it’s a really bad strategy to wait until you get punched on the nose before you respond.

“We put a good period together with a good chance for Ben Perry so it was a tight first half with not much in it

“We got to half-time, tweaked a few bits then went out in the second half and conceded almost straight away.

“As a manager for 20 years, when you go down 2-0 away from home, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times the team comes back and gets a positive result.

“So it was a really poor start to both halves.”