De Laet: Phillips A Fox In The Box

Phillips became the Club’s oldest ever goal scorer in the process, and helped the team extend their already record breaking winning run to nine straight league victories. 

The January transfer window addition to the squad has won promotion to the Premier League on four separate occasions, and has performed at the highest level on a regular basis throughout his career. 

And after being impressed by the 40-year-old in training, De Laet is expecting further goal scoring heroics from the former Sunderland and England man. 

“You can see he’s been around the block and knows every trick in the book,” said De Laet of his team-mate. 

“Even in training you can see he’s still sharp. When a defender heads the ball he knows where it’s going to go and picks his position, so he’s a fox in the box really and he’ll score more important goals for us this season.” 

The 1-0 victory over the newly promoted Cherries wasn’t easy, particularly on a pitch that had been battered by the recent spell of bad weather. 

That said, Nigel Pearson’s side did enjoy the better of the chances and restricted their opponents to just a few shots from distance on their way to a 10th clean sheet of the campaign. 

De Laet added: “It’s (getting a clean sheet) brilliant for a defender, but we still have to score goals at the other end. That’s what we have been doing and that’s been enough to get us the three points. 

“It was hard. We knew when we came out for the warm up that it was going to be a battle. It was a heavy pitch and hard to play on but we knew there were going to be long balls all around and battles to win headers. 

“I think we handled it well in the end. We had some chances first half and maybe we had nipped ahead there, but we like to make it hard for ourselves away from home it seems. We grabbed the winner with Kev (Kevin Phillips) then battled on for 10 minutes and won the game.” 

The talk surrounding the team’s current form is of promotion, but De Laet was insistent that with a little help from their manager, the squad are keeping their focus. 

He revealed: “Every day the gaffer tells the players to keep their feet on the ground. It’s a hard league and there are many games to go, but we’ll just keep battling away [on Saturday against Watford] and hopefully get the three points. 

“You can see it’s a real tight group. Everyone is together and everyone is in it together. It’s just brilliant for the players and fans to see that and be so close together. 

“Every win we have is one less win that we need to get promoted. We’ve got nine in a row now and hopefully we can make it 10 at the weekend.”