Gary Bowyer praised the character of his Salford players as they snatched a late 1-0 win at home to Bradford.

Bradford, who went into the game on a three-match winless run, started brightly and nearly opened the scoring inside 15 minutes, but Andy Cook’s header dropped narrowly wide of the far post.

The in-form forward threatened to add to his season tally of four goals, but Welsh goalkeeper Tom King marked his return from international duty with an inspired performance, first thwarting Cook with an impressive full-stretch save and then again with a double stop soon after.

Although the match looked destined to end goalless, Matty Lund met a deep corner in the 90th minute to snatch a winner, much to the delight of boss Bowyer, who recorded another victory for Salford against his former side.

He said: “I’ve got to give an enormous amount of credit to the players because I thought they were terrific again today. It was a really tough game with two good teams.

“We showed a different side to us today which was really pleasing. We’ve got good players and a good squad. We’ve been tested today, but we knew Lund was a threat at set pieces – we worked on it in training this week and I can only give the players a huge amount of credit.

“They’re a tight group and they feel that the performances they’ve had so far this season have not been rewarded with points.

“What they’ve done brilliantly in my opinion is they’ve not felt sorry for themselves. If you were to walk into training and look at our atmosphere and our environment that they create and generate, it’s a real positive one and they’ve reaped the rewards today.”

Bradford boss Derek Adams was left frustrated after going down to a “sucker punch”.

He said: “It’s a game that we dominated – we created 17 opportunities to 12. Salford are one of the best teams in the league at creating opportunities, but we’ve come here and created so many and we’ve been done with a sucker punch at the end.

“(Richard) O’Donnell doesn’t have a save to make and their goalkeeper makes two unbelievable saves. We have umpteen opportunities to score goals and it was the same last week – we should have scored more, and we haven’t.

“Everybody looks at the game when the score is 1-0 to Salford and they think that’s the story of the match, but it isn’t.

“We don’t deserve to come away from here with no points, we deserved the three on the chances that we had. The problem for a manager is you’re judged on wins – you’re not judged on chances and that is a big problem. We need to be more clinical.”