Town boss Paul Jewell praised his side’s workrate as they beat Bristol City 1-0 at Ashton Gate despite being down to 10 men and revealed that Damien Delaney and others are close to signing their new contracts. Josh Carson's 30-yard strike saw the Blues to their eighth away win of the season and up to 12th in the Championship.
Jewell was delighted with his team’s fourth win in five games, achieved despite being down to men for 61 minutes after Lee Martin was sent off: "I’d rather do it with 11. Playing with 10 men for an hour on a hot day was always going to be difficult, but you could see how hard the lads worked.
"We kept our shape, had a little bit of luck at times, but in the second half I can’t remember our goalkeeper having too many saves to make. In fact, if we’d have been a little more clinical we could have scored a couple of goals.”
The Town manager was unsighted on the red card incident but felt a similar challenge had gone unpunished a few minutes earlier: "I didn’t have a great view of it, but the only thing I would say is that I think there was a foul committed by Cisse in the middle of the park five minutes previously and it wasn’t given as a foul.
"But I thought the referee had a decent game, in fairness to him. Lee’s strength isn’t his tackling. It was mistimed, there wouldn’t have been any malice in it. I’ll have to watch it on DVD again.
"That’s the difficulty of refereeing. I asked him at half-time about the Cisse one and he said he didn’t have a great view of it, so there you go.”
Jewell says midfielder Grant Leadbitter was taken to hospital after sustaining a head injury during the second half, causing the game to be held up for seven minutes: "He’s been taken away to hospital with concussion and hopefully we’ll be able to bring him home.
"We’ll have to monitor the situation. I think he was unconscious but he was OK when he came off. I can’t say any more than that until tomorrow.
"It was a bang on the back of his head, there was no blood or anything like that. It was just an honest clash of heads.”
The Town manager played down suggestions of a late play-off push: "I don’t even know how many points we are away. Six? When we got here it was about making sure we didn’t get relegated.
"We’ve got four games left, that’s 12 points. If we win all those you never know, but it’s highly unlikely, let’s be honest.”
The Town boss met with agents representing Damien Delaney and Gareth McAuley on Friday and says new deals are close to being formally announced: "I spoke to Damien yesterday and we’re agreed and definitely on Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, we’ll have some news on both or even three, or even four or five, who knows what will happen over the weekend.”
Bristol City manager Keith Millen was annoyed that his team lost to 10 men: "I’m angry that we haven’t got something out of the game. At 11 v 11 I was quite comfortable, I thought we did OK.
"We were more on the front foot and had two or three opportunities. I said to them at half-time that they’ve got to demand more, that it’s not acceptable to be missing these chances and you get punished if you don’t take them.
"When they went down to 10 men in the second half it made it hard for us to break them down. The goal probably summed us up, it was a poor goal from our point of view."
"It was a bad ball in to the midfield which gave it away, one touch and a soft shot which has gone in. It summed up our display on the day.
"After that we huffed and puffed. When you’re playing against 10 men you’ve got to keep the width and keep the ball moving quickly and we didn’t do that. We didn’t move the ball well enough today but we probably created enough chances to get something out of the game.”