FC Halifax Town 2-1 Chorley: The gamble paid off, says Heath

Goals from Matty Kosylo and Richard Peniket helped Town to their first win in two months.

Heath admitted the change in system was only implemented when the players gathered in the changing room on the evening of the game.

“I’m very pleased,” he said. “Of course, we’re here to win football matches and when you’re not doing that, the pressure builds.

“I’m pleased for the players and everybody. We haven’t been getting what we deserve at times I think.

“It was good to get what we deserved.

“It was a big gamble when we switched formations - a huge gamble.

“We’d not worked on it. We walked into the changing room and said ‘right, we’re playing 3-5-2’, but sometimes that works.

“Sometimes it fails miserably. But me and Mark (Carroll, assistant manager) talked about it over the weekend, and we’ve got the players to play that formation.

“We thought that was our best formation, especially because they play it as well, so we just matched them up.

“But to a man they were magnificent. Kosylo will get the plaudits and rightly so because he had an outstanding game.

“But they all did exactly what we asked them.”

Top-scorer Tom Denton was dropped to the bench, but Heath played down the significance of the decision.

“At the end of the day it’s a squad game and nobody’s got a divine right to play,” he said.

“Nobody is guaranteed a game. We’ve had Liam King out of the team for a while.

“You stand and fall by your decisions and we made a decision to take Tom out of the side.

“It’s no different from taking Cliff Moyo out of the side - you need a squad and we chose a team to win the game, and they did.”

Centre-back Danny Hone started despite his red card at Stalybridge on Saturday, but Heath insisted the decision was not connected with standing by the defender.

“It’s not about standing by anybody,” he said, “it’s just picking the team you think will win the game, that’s all you do.

“People might say I haven;t been getting it right recently, but that’s the way it is.

“I thought the back three were magnificent.

“Danny’s played in that role before for me. He knows what it’s about, he doesn’t get exposed.

“He’s experienced, he’s played hundreds of league games when he was a young man.

“There’ll be some players that will never be able to fulfill people’s expectations of them, whatever they do.”

Kosylo gave a man-of-the-match display on the night, but Heath admitted playing him in the number 10 role was a big call too.

“Once again, that was a gamble, because he’s never played there before,” said the Town boss.

“Sometimes you have to be brave when you haven’t been winning games.

“If we’d come off the pitch having lost 4-0 - it’s not too different to how we’ve been doing, so what did we have to lose?

“We thought it’d work with Matty in the hole, we thought he could get on the ball.

“They have problems with little one-twos in and around the three centre-halves and we thought Matty could get in those holes and influence things.

“The only question was if we could get him on the ball enough, but we did, and he made lot of right choices, like a lot of players did.”