Braintree Town Reserves boss Mark Sansom felt his side were worthy of the Thurlow Nunn League division one point they received against Halstead Town last night.

Having been trailing 2-1 with five minutes to go, Braintree needed a late penalty to rescue a point, but Sansom felt it was nothing less than they deserved.

He said: “I think we worked hard and battled hard and, on the balance of play, I think we’d have been unfairly treated if we’d gone away with nothing.

“From my point of view, I think we had as many chances as Halstead and from our best passage of play came the second penalty.

“You can’t argue with either of the penalties.

“They were both penalties and we executed them perfectly, so there are our two goals.”

Jonah Gosling fired home both of Braintree’s penalties - one in each half - to negate Jordan Palmer’s two strikes in the first half for Halstead.

It gave Braintree four points from their two Back-to-back meetings with Halstead this week and while he knows his team aren’t title contenders this year, Sansom is happy with how his players are developing.

He added: “I said to the boys afterwards that Halstead are a team that is aspiring to be promoted, while we are aspiring to teach them how to play the game in the right way and to develop them.

“We had eight or nine under-18s in the side we put out and I think when we got the ball down and played, we played the better football.

“We don’t want to go up, but I’d love to push on and get as high up the table as we can.

“We aren’t saying we’re title contenders and we want to go up, what we are saying is we want to do the best we can and develop players in the right way.

“Therefore we have to learn from their two goals.

“We had a chance to clear the first and didn’t and gave a silly free-kick away for the second one.

“Both incidents cost us and so we have to learn from that “Halstead are title contenders, but we’ve played them three times now this season and haven’t lost against them.

“We need to take confidence from that because we are a lot better than what we realise.

“There are some good young players in there.”

Braintree Town Reserves are due to be back at the Amlin Stadium on Saturday when they host Long Melford in the league.