It was the “heroic” performance of his Braintree Town players that brought the praises of boss Danny Cowley rather than the point they earned from a 1-1 draw at Cheltenham Town.

Anthony Edgar’s 90th minute goal was cancelled out by an injury-time leveller from the hosts as Braintree extended their unbeaten away run to seven games.

They have now taken 17 points from a possible 21 in that run, but had to overcome a number of injury setbacks both before and during the game at Whaddon Road to pick up their latest point.

“I thought we were immense,” said Cowley.

“We were disappointed to concede so late on, especially after scoring ourselves in the 90th minute but we were fantastic to a man.

“Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong in terms of injuries and it was a real backs against the wall effort.

“We lost Mark Phillips from Saturday so we were two centre-halves light already and during the game, we lost Sam Habergham to a dead leg, Chez Isaac picked up a hamstring injury and Dan Sparkes ended up playing 90 minutes on half a groin.

“The boys were unbelieveable.

“Some performances go well beyond the win-loss-draw columns.

“I’m not thinking about league points or positions, I’m just mightily proud of the efforts of my players.

“Cheltenham are a good team and are geared to go back into the Football League.

“They have an experienced manager and some very good players.

“The first half unfolded how we expected it to.

“We were always a threat on the counter-attack and while they probably had the majority of the territory, we had the better of the chances.

“In the second half, so much went wrong for us in terms of injuries and personnel that we had six or seven players on the field who were only about five foot six or seven.

“Cheltenham are a big team so defending set pieces was difficult, but it was absolutely heroic from our boys and I’m really proud of them.”