NATHAN Jones was thrilled to see two academy products on the scoresheet as Charlton Athletic made it back-to-back League One wins by beating Cambridge United 2-1 at The Valley on Boxing Day.
Tyreece Campbell and Miles Leaburn scored in the first half before Liam Bennett pulled a goal back after the break.
“It was great to see two academy products, two young players, scoring here at The Valley.,” Jones said on Charlton TV. “We missed [Campbell], we missed his pace. Miles has been out for eleven months and sort of gathering it and finding his feet. They started gathering a bit of momentum.
“We’ve got DK [Daniel Kanu] not involved today, Chuks [Aneke] not involved today, and then the likes of Gasan [Ahamdme] Hilts [Danny Hylton] and [Matty] Godden on the bench. It shows we’ve got good firepower, so they need to be at it, but that’s two and two for the pair of them and they’re contributing, that can only be good for the football club.”
Charlton are four points off the play-offs after following up their 5-0 win at Northampton Town.
Jones said: “It was important we backed up the last performance and win, and I thought we did that really well for the majority of the game. Obviously they had a 10-15 minute period after half-time where they came out and we weren’t aggressive enough.
“We didn’t handle that, but overall, I thought we were we were good value for it without being our fluent self. We showed good resilience, we showed real character.”
The Addicks started the game quickly, with Tyreece Campbell scoring within 36 seconds. Jones’ side were 2-0 up on the 20th minute, after going up by the same scoreline in 13 minutes on Saturday.
“We work religiously on it,” Jones said of trying to start the game quickly. We want to get off to fast starts. We want tempo in our play. It’s good because if we do that, then we don’t lose football games. We score first, we don’t lose football games. So that’s been really, really important.”
