Four Welsh teams across the Football League and not a single defeat adds up to a successful weekend for the nation’s leading clubs.

Wrexham led the way in terms of goalscoring, with a 6-0 thrashing of Morecambe, but perhaps the performance to place at the top of the pile was that of their League Two rivals, Newport County.

Struggling for form and down near the lower reaches, few gave them much hope of upsetting league leaders Stockport County at Rodney Parade.

After all, the visitors were chasing what would have been a 13^th successive victory and a new record sequence at that tier.

But Newport ran out deserved 2-1 winners and scored two cracking goals into the bargain.

Bryn Morris opened the scoring for Newport on the stroke of half-time, before Shane McLoughlin made it 2-0 just past the hour.

Issac Olaofe pulled a goal back for Stockport in the sixth minute of added time, but Newport held out to move up to 16th in the table, seven points adrift of the play-off places with still over half the season remaining.

“It’s a great victory… but we want to be a consistent team, we don’t want to be a team that delivers once or twice a month…. let’s string a few together and I might crack a smile,” said Newport boss Graham Coughlan.

“I’m frustrated because I’m a centre-half and I like clean sheets… but I thought overall our performance was really good.

“There’s not a lot of teams in the league can live with Stockport, let alone match them and a lot of credit must go to them for what they’ve done.

“But you can probably see why I get annoyed, why I get angry… because those lads are capable of that, and I know they’re capable of that, and it’s just getting that consistency week-in week-out, keeping those standards.”

Wrexham’s emphatic win included a hat-trick for their leading marksman Paul Mullin to take him to nine goals for the season.

It also lifted Wrexham up to second in the table, with the gap between themselves and Stockport reduced to five points.

The Reds’ boss Phil Parkinson praised his team for their ruthlessness.

“We really caught Morecambe cold in the early exchanges,” he said.

 

 

“Was the game over then? No, because Morecambe are a dangerous team.

“We said to the lads at half-time and 3-0 up that we have got to keep the standards high, keep passing the ball, keep switching the play and finding the overloads in wide areas, and when we did that we looked a really threatening team.

“Today was about being ruthless in the way we went about our business.”

Erol Bulut hailed Cardiff City’s team ethic after they climbed to seventh place in the Championship table with a dramatic win at Preston North End.

The Bluebirds boss believes the 2-1 victory – won with two goals deep into stoppage time – can prove more significant than merely closing the gap to the play-offs to just a single point.

“It’s a very important win for us here today,” said Bulut.

“From the first minute of the match until right up until the end of the game, my players showed the character that they needed to.”

Swansea City boss Michael Duff says he is hopeful of signing free agent Yannick Bolasie on a short-term deal.

The former Everton and Crystal Palace winger, 34, has trained with the club this week and could join ahead of Wednesday’s trip to Leeds.

“Yannick’s been in the building for a week. Hopefully that’ll get done,” said Duff.

“He hasn’t got the pace and power he once had, but you don’t get bought for £25m (by Everton) if you don’t know how to handle a football. It’ll be a two-month deal and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

It comes after the Swans relinquished a two-goal lead to draw 2-2 with Hull City on Saturday afternoon, much to Duff’s frustration.

Frustration is the word,” said the former Burnley defender. “There was lots of good stuff in the first half, some good quality football, possession with purpose.

“We played through them and hurt them, I thought we were good value for the 2-0 lead. The second half, they score from the first attack which sucked the energy out of the team.”