Birmingham 0 Glovers 2

Third time lucky was something we’d hoped the game with Birmingham would be for The Glovers, and that’s what it proved as we won for the first time this year in the SkyBet Championship.

In the first ever game we’ve played against Birmingham at St Andrews two goals from James Hayter were enough to give us a big 2-0 win to give our relegation battle a shot in the arm.

Any helping hand that you can get is gratefully accepted, certainly when you’re in relegation trouble like we are, and Hayden Mullins gave us just this. Trying to head the ball back to Darren Randolph he completely missed the ball with Hayter latching onto this to dispatch past the goalkeeper with 12-minutes played.

The Glovers were on fire; Randolph was soon called into action again with a double save preventing Joe Ralls firstly and then Kieffer Moore with the follow up.

With just 19-minutes played though Randolph couldn’t prevent it being third time lucky with attempts too when Hayter glanced home a header to give us some clear daylight with less than half the first half played.

The bar came to our rescue to deny Lee Novak’s header, with Marek Stech beaten, but Stech wasn’t beaten by another effort from Reece Brown though. A well struck effort was saved by Stech to preserve the lead as Birmingham threatened to get back into the game.

It wasn’t a surprise that Birmingham pilled on the pressure the more the game wore on but we defended well and also had Stech to thank again when he produced a point blank save to stop Brian Howard getting one back, with over 20-minutes to play at that stage.

Gary Johnson wanted ‘cup finals’ to be won, with the manager also knowing we need to string together some wins. Birmingham was the game that he’d hoped we could start this and that was the case and that would’ve made the journey all the more worthwhile for almost 700 fans.

We’re still in the relegation zone at the moment but if we can build on this we could soon be out of it, and building on this is something The Glovers need to do if we want to preserve our SkyBet Championship status.