GARY Waddock hailed the never say die attitude of his players, saying they were all “outstanding” as they claimed a late draw at Notts County.

Wanderers looked like they were on their way to another awayday defeat until Joel Grant’s rocket in injury time lit up this Bonfire Night encounter.

Many members of the Nottingham press felt Wanderers were the best visiting side to play at Meadow Lane this season, but Waddock said his players performed just as they had done without reward in the rest of their league matches.

The Blues boss said: “It shows the commitment and desire for them to get a result. To come so late in the game shows their never say die attitude. They kept going and they kept believing.

“They had the confidence. Not once have you seen their heads drop. They have kept working. This is a very important result for us.

“I thought we played very well, especially second half. We kept plugging away and we got our reward in the end, which I felt we deserved.

“Everybody, to a man, was outstanding today. Everybody’s played a part again today.

“This is a very difficult place to come and get anything. The way we played second half was very encouraging. They are that far up the table for a reason. For us to come here and play like we did was very encouraging.

“In recent weeks we’ve played like that against the top sides and got absolutely nothing from them. I’ll take a point – we wanted to break the sequence and we were able to do that.

“They say it evens itself out over the season. I was very pleased with the performance.”

He added: “There haven’t been too many occasions where we’ve had to say they haven’t performed. It’s just unfortunate we haven’t picked up the points we’ve deserved. Today we performed very, very well and the least we deserved was a point.”

Waddock was down to the bare bones in defence with James Tunnicliffe recovering from an operation and Dave Winfield ill, meaning full-back Danny Foster had to fill in at centre half.

Despite coming up against two big, powerful forwards in Lee Hughes and Ben Burgess Wanderers were able to ensure goalkeeper Nikki Bull wasn’t a busy man.

Waddock said: “I thought Marvin [McCoy] was outstanding, our centre half Fossie was outstanding alongside Johnno [Leon Johnson] and [Grant] Basey. Our back four was limited in terms of height but they were able to contain Notts County’s front line pretty well. They do put you under pressure but the back four and Nikki Bull were outstanding.”

He also praised goalscorer Grant for his late equaliser: “Joel’s got a lot of ability. The lads have said to take the opportunity to shoot – that’s what could happen. We’ve spoken about getting late goals and today we did that.”