Plymouth boss Steven Schumacher revealed his in-form side were far from happy with their performance despite beating 10-man Accrington 4-0 to continue their promotion push.

Argyle climbed up to fourth in League One after recording a fifth successive victory without conceding a goal, with Panutche Camara, Joe Edwards, Niall Ennis and Ryan Hardie the men on the scoresheet.

However, despite the final result, Plymouth found it far from easy and Schumacher conceded they were second best for much of the match until Stanley saw goalkeeper Toby Savin sent off in the 68th minute for bringing down Hardie.

Plymouth had just gone 3-0 up before that incident but Schumacher – and his players – know the scoreline did not tell the full story.

Schumacher said: “The players have said we have to play better than that, which sounds mad, because you can’t be too disappointed with a 4-0 home win.

“I didn’t think we played that great today. I thought Accrington were probably the best team, certainly in the first half.

“And probably for the first 10 or 15 minutes of the second half we didn’t play great.

“Our lads have all just said the same in the dressing room.

“Up until the goalkeeper got sent off it was a real tough game.

“I just thought we didn’t show enough quality especially in the first half.

“We produced two moments (of quality) and we scored two goals but apart from that there were a few breaks where we were two versus two and three versus three on their goal and we just didn’t make the right pass.

“It was tough. I just felt they put us under loads of pressure and from a few set-pieces and few corners they caused us problems, as we expected.

“I thought we were second best but teams at the top of the league find a way to win, and that’s what we did.”

Accrington boss John Coleman also felt his side should not have been on the end of a 4-0 scoreline but says they did not help themselves with poor decision-making at both ends of the pitch.

He said: “We seem to find a way to gift goals to teams and not take the chances we get. Four-nil sounds like a drubbing and, in the end, it is a drubbing.

“But 11 versus 11, could you honestly say they were the better team? Far from it. They had a period of domination when we went down to 10. That’s not their fault we went to 10.

“But they scored the first, second and third goals totally against the run of play. We have managed to conspire to miss three glorious chances all at crucial parts of the game. And then our decision-making is poor at best.

“I can’t fault the lads’ efforts, we could have thrown the towel in and got beat by 10. We didn’t. We tried to be brave.

“But we have to snap out of this because it is a recipe of disaster when you give stupid goals away and we miss gilt-edged chances at the other end.”