Argyle were 2-1 winners over Rochdale, after scoring a late goal to progress through to the third round of the competition.
“If we analyse the game, I think in the first half we weren’t quite us with the ball – I’d like us to be a little bit better,” said the Gaffer in his post-match interview.
“I didn’t think we were particularly poor, I just thought we just sort of lacked our normal composure, and then I thought we were excellent in the second half. I thought we were very, very good.
“I know they hit the post a couple of times but in general play I thought we were the better team in the second half and it’s obviously very disappointing to lose it so late on when I was thinking we were going to win it with the momentum we were building.”
After Plymouth took a 1-0 lead into half-time, Aaron Morley equalised ten minutes into the second half with a stunning strike.
“Aaron has got that ability, and we saw it against Sutton United. He should be adding more goals to his game. I’m not taking anything away from it because it was a brilliant goal, but he could be getting to double figures as a midfielder.
“The ability that he’s got from that distance, I haven’t really worked with many better and I’ve worked with some decent players. It was a top class goal and it’s just a shame that we couldn’t get another one.”
The visitors netted their winner with four minutes of the game remaining. In the build up to them winning the corner that ultimately lead to the goal, there were big shouts for what looked like a two-handed shove on Jake Beesley’s back on the edge of Argyle area but the referee waved away the appeals.
“I’ve only seen it live and I think it’s a foul [on Jake]. I haven’t seen it back on the TV so I will obviously stand corrected if it doesn’t look like a free-kick. My opinion is that it would have been a really big decision for the referee to make where this situation was and before I get fined, I’m going to stop there.”
Rochdale more than held their own against their League One opponents for much of the match and Stockdale says he was pleased with Dale’s performance and wants to take that forward into the league.
“Pride in a performance – I get that, but we haven’t won and it’s two goals conceded that I don’t think they’ve had to work particularly hard for.
“But we can take lots of positives from it, that’s a definite. I don’t think there was much of a difference between the two teams considering they’re a division above. So [can we] take pride from it? It’s just like, yes, I was pleased with the performance and we’ve now got to put that into the league. I believe we’ve been playing quite well and our run suggests we’ve been doing that, and I think today was an outcome of where we’ve been playing and how we’ve been playing.
“We want to climb and we want to look up. We’ve got two difficult games away from home now which are two decent trips and we need to make sure this isn’t just a one-off because it’s on TV.
“The actual bread and butter of the season is the league and we want to do well in that. We’ll digest this performance and we’ll analyse it, but there were loads of positives to take out of it. I hope that people, certainly in the stadium, are going away pleased with our effort. Our quality was good and on another day we probably could be in the next round.”
Watch the Gaffer’s interview in full on YouTube.
