Manager Darrell Clarke hailed the efforts of his players as Port Vale brushed aside Colchester 3-0 to make it seven points from nine.

The Valiants led after six minutes through James Gibbons and James Wilson added a second 10 minutes later.

Vale should have had more in a dominant first half but it was left to Aaron Martin to seal victory with their third goal just past the hour mark.

Following victory against Barrow and grinding out a midweek draw at Mansfield, Clarke was proud of his side’s comprehensive win back on home turf.

He said: “It’s been a good week and a good performance to finish off.

“We’ve got seven points out of nine so I’m over the moon we finished off with a strong performance.

“You always look at your targets and we’d have maybe been looking at six points from those three and we’ve managed to get seven out of the week.

“We had to dig in on Tuesday night but the pleasing thing for me was the response to what wasn’t a great performance by us at Mansfield and the lads were very good.

“Sometimes we can’t get too carried away that we don’t perform at our best and we have to grind results out, that’s football at this level, but we were looking for a response in front of our own punters and the lads have produced that tremendously.

“I don’t think there were many bad performances, I know that if we get 11 players that are at seven or eight out of 10 it gives us a great chance to win.”

A desperately disappointing show by the U’s left head coach Hayden Mullins rueing individual mistakes and surrendering of possession that proved so costly.

Mullins admitted their first-half display left them with a mountain to climb against a buoyant Valiants side, a task they could not overcome.

He said: “I think we played right into their hands. We made mistakes we really got punished for, which hasn’t happened in recent weeks.

“Going 2-0 down here was always going to be tough to try to come back from.

“We created some chances and if we’d taken one of them it could have been a different game but they pressed us and we played into their hands.

“We were given a warning before the goal and you’d think we’d take heed of it but we gave it away a couple of times, in really dangerous areas, which was the uncomfortable thing.

“It’s not like us, we’ve been quite solid away from home, but we’ve made some really poor errors and we got done for it, we were punished and found ourselves 2-0 down away from home and it was a tough ask.

“We came here with a game plan but then that goes out of the window early on. We gave them the momentum at home, the crowd got a bit louder and it became a tough afternoon.”