Matt Taylor praised his Exeter side for beating Cambridge in what he described as “difficult circumstances”.

The Grecians came away from the Abbey Stadium with a 4-1 success after a fast start which saw them score twice in the opening 15 minutes through Ryan Bowman and Jack Sparkes.

Exeter then withstood pressure early in the second half from Cambridge, who pulled a goal back through Joe Ironside, with further strikes from Archie Collins and Matt Jay leaving them a point from the play-off spots.

“We lost Robbie Willmott yesterday with an injury. We’ve got a goalkeeper who’s been sick throughout the warm-up. We were running out of players,” said Taylor.

“I was worried before the game because that’s the lowest we’ve been in terms of where the squad’s been at, but what a fantastic performance. We just started the game well and grew in terms of the belief.

“They’re such a good attacking team this season, Cambridge, scored so many goals, similar to ourselves, but we felt there would be space on that pitch. Certainly on the regain, we broke through that space on numerous occasions and created enough to hurt them. Getting ahead was absolutely key.

“They were dangerous, they can create chances out of nothing. They’ve got such good quality players and you saw for that 10-15 minute period at the start of the second half what a good team they were.

“We changed shape and just took a little bit of extra space away from them but still packed a punch ourselves. That group of players have got what they deserved today.”

Cambridge dropped off the top of the Sky Bet League Two table as a result and boss Mark Bonner rued the poor start his side made, but remained confident the U’s can respond well for the promotion run-in.

“We didn’t start well enough and it was too easy for them all afternoon to create chances against us and score against us, and that’s not normally us,” he said.

“They’re top scorers for a reason and they showed that a little bit. We weren’t as aggressive or intense as we needed to be to stop them from creating the chances that they did.

“We played for 15 minutes like the team we want to be. Just after half-time, when we got the goal, we looked a really good team, we had a good chance that hit the side netting and then the third goal killed us off really.

“We draw a line under it quite quickly. It’s not a competition for who can be the angriest and most upset on Monday, because if you spend your time worrying about the last game you won’t do what you need to, which is the next one.

“The way we’ve handled that has been great. We’ve won so many of the next games when we’ve lost this season, and that’s because of the way that we’ve handled it.”