NEAL ARDLEY credited his players’ ‘fantastic effort’ in securing a point in York City’s 0-0 draw with Rochdale at the Crown Oil Arena.

York sustained heavy pressure to manage a point in a goalless draw over the Pennines, with Ardley proud of the efforts of his side against a free-flowing Rochdale outfit.

The City boss looked ahead to a heavy period of matches over the Christmas period, with Ardley anticipating a different sort of opponent in the coming weeks.

“Without the ball it was a fantastic effort, we had structure and these are a free flowing team with their full-backs underlying their wingers,” Ardley admitted.

“We did a lot of work to make sure that we didn’t find ourselves in the same position as last week, 3-0 down in 20 minutes.

“With the ball on the transitions we had so many opportunities where we could have broke and got into great areas to hurt them, but our quality let us down and our quality in the transitions was really poor.

“We’ve worked on that all week, but I can’t fault the team’s effort, the team spirit, the camaraderie to put bodies on the line and to defend our box properly, but if we had a bit more quality then we would have had a bit more of a chance.

“The next four games which we’ll set up this week are all teams that play good open football, Gateshead are the best footballing team in the league by a country mile and Ebbsfleet play great football.

“Rochdale walloped York 3-1 just before I arrived comfortably, and it could have been five.

“Same with Ebbsfleet, my job is to give us structure in our quality edge and to add a bit more quality to it.

“If I’m a fan whose travelled here today on a chilly pre-Christmas game, I’ll go away and moan a little bit at the quality, but I can’t bemoan the team that put everything on the line for me.

“Last week I put out a really attacking team in a cup game and we were 3-0 down in 20 minutes, the people you want to trust didn’t do their jobs and we ended up behind.

“The best move we had was when Will Davies got in down the side, and their ‘keeper has made a great save at his near post.

“We worked on it in training and within three passes we got Callum Harriott into a pocket and he’s slid Will Davies into an area, we did that all week.

“Every point is important to us at the moment, competitive performances at the moment."

Ardley also explained the decision to place Tyler Cordner on the substitutes bench in place of Will Smith, a choice which surprised the York supporters.

“Tyler is a wonderful football player, playing out of the back he is probably one of the best centre-halves in the league.

“I’ve spoke to Tyler last week and said that I need him to defend more as a centre-halve rather than a central midfielder, because he plays like a central midfielder with the ball, because he’s that good on it.

“I need more defence, I made him captain last week and put him in the back line last week, I wanted him to go head things and lead and that’s the conversation me and him have had.

“It’s about him defending better and today I looked at everyone in training, training is important, we did loads of shape work and most of them on that pitch trained better than others and made my decision a lot easier.”