Hart impressed by Notts County

Notts County caretaker Paul Hart was impressed with the endeavour of his battle-hardened troops in their 2-2 draw with Scunthorpe.

Hart, in charge at Meadow Lane for one game only following the sacking of Shaun Derry earlier this week, saw his team fall behind in the first minute as Theo Robinson struck on his Scunthorpe debut. By the Magpies hit back to level through Gary Jones and were heading for only their second home win since October when Balint Bajner climbed off the bench to score. But Niall Canavan secured the Iron a point four minutes from time to leave both sides looking over their shoulders. Hart said: "Second half we lost a little bit of confidence, which is understandable in this situation, but overall I'm really proud of the players. They can hold their heads up high. "Each and every one of them worked their socks off and showed great endeavour. "From a bunch of lads who were all over the place at the start of the week, with the loss of their manager and his assistant, they girded their loins and got at it. "We dropped deeper in the second half, but that's understandable. "People do feel the pressure of relegation and when it comes to trying to overcome it, it's one thing saying it and another thing doing it. "There's something to build on. Certainly in the first half we took control of the ball and passed it around and looked like we could go on and get another goal. "If we had done, we'd have been nicely placed to take the game on." Scunthorpe are now nine games without a win and just a point clear of the drop zone with eight games left to play. But manager Mark Robins believes his team can be proud of the point gained that kept Notts below them. "It was a decent performance," he said. "I think we started brilliantly, got ourselves in front early on and then shot ourselves in the foot by conceding a really, really poor goal. "From their perspective, he hit it well, but it should never have flown into our net. "If we can cut out those mistakes and continue to play in the manner we did, we'll be ok. "We showed good resilience to come back from 2-1 down. "We didn't scrap our way back into it either, we played our way back into it. "I thought we were on top and at the end we missed a golden chance to win it. "I've got to take the point. Sometimes you can be stuck on a number of points and we've been on 42 for a while. "Now we've moved in the right direction."