George Burley was pleased with his side's "bread and butter" performances against Fulham and Everton and says Town need to keep their run going to guarantee Premiership survival.

A happy Blues' boss said: "This was one we had to win. If we had lost they would have been away from us, but now we have kept our run going and are rising all the time. The team were tremendous and our three centre-backs were outstanding against their big men. We have shown a lot of character. It's hard to do that when you are rock bottom and struggling. People said we were going down at Christmas, but we have continued to pull ourselves away from trouble and I'm very, very pleased with my team."

But Burley warned that the job wasn't done quite yet: "There is still no security for anyone in the bottom half, none at all. It's so tight and there are a lot of clubs fighting to stay in the Premiership. We had a bad start to the week going out of the Cup, and we were poor in that game. But we've won against Fulham and now Everton since then and to be fair, these games are our bread and butter and the way we will stay in the top flight."

Everton boss Walter Smith now finds his side on the edge of the relegation battle: "I accept that we are in trouble, but then so is everybody in the bottom section, we've all had very similar seasons. But we have handled it before in previous seasons and we will have to show that same commitment to handle it again. We were disappointing and lost the game in the first half hour. We struggled to create anything and it didn't get any better. We pinned them back for long periods of the second half but were never able to open them up."

Town scorer Matt Holland was pleased to have got Town's winner: "It was a big, big result for us and it pushes us on to to 30 points. Our form of late has been excellent; seven wins out of eight and long may it continue. It was nice to score but the most important thing was to get the three points. We are very pleased with the result. The form has been very good, we felt at the start of the season that we were not playing that badly but things were not going for us but obviously things have turned around for us. We are closing teams down quicker and we're getting behind teams and Marcus Bent has been a good addition for us, he has done ever so well."

Photo: Action Images

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