Mansfield Town had ‘nothing to fear’ as stunner shocks Burnley
Mansfield Town captain Louis Reed scored a stunning free-kick to dump Premier League side Burnley out of the FA Cup in the fourth round.
Josh Laurent put the Clarets ahead in the first half at Turf Moor, but it was cancelled out by Rhys Oates shortly after the interval.
Nigel Clough’s side looked the more likely team to grab the winner as the game wore on, and it was Reed who clinched it when he fired a knuckleball strike into the top left corner with ten minutes left on the clock.
The Stags are in the fifth round of the FA Cup for the first time in over half a century, and it’s the first time they have have eliminated a top-flight side from the FA Cup for the first time since February 1969.
They had lost nine successive matches in this competition against clubs in the top tier since defeating West Ham 3-0.
Mansfield Town had ‘nothing to fear’ as stunner shocks Burnley
First team coach Andy Garner was asked afterwards if Mansfield could believe they had pulled off the upset. “Yeah we can,” he told TNT Sports.
“We said that to them at half-time, that we didn’t think there was anything to fear. We were a little disappointed in the first half with how much we gave the ball away, especially in the final third a bit sloppy at times.
“We said, ‘let’s get back into this game’ and we believed we could.”
The League One outfit did not sit in a low block and hope to catch Burnley on the break, instead taking the game to the Premier League club.
“We didn’t want to come here and sit back,” Garner added. “We wanted to go forward and have a go. We did that in the first 25 minutes but the quality wasn’t great and we are better than that. In the second half we improved and scored two very good goals.”
On his winning goal, Mansfield captain Louis Reed told Final Score: “As soon as it left my boot I felt it going in. I have been working on them throughout the week. The lads said, ‘This is your moment, go and take it’. Thankfully, I did.
“It shows what a group we have got. The draws we keep getting are big ones. I felt we were always in the game even when we were 1-0 down at half-time.
“I think it’s a cliché, whoever we get in the next round, we will go into that with the same energy as this one.”
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