Mark Beesley felt the Cambridge United players owed their manager and supporters the performance and result they produced in Saturday's 4-1 win against Woking.

Beesley set up Danny Crow's two goals before the break, then ended his own personal goal drought with a well-taken strike midway through the second half before Robbie Willmott netted from a free kick, and he was understandably pleased afterwards.

"I haven't played for two months so I was raring to go," he admitted. "I was part of Wednesday's embarrassment against Crawley and we needed to put it right, and I think we did. We owed the manager and the fans a performance and we showed everyone that we can play and we can beat teams comfortably."

Despite their lowly position in the bottom four, in-form Woking came to Cambridge having only lost once in their previous nine games and the likes of Wilfried Domoraud and former U Liam Marum kept the defence on their toes throughout the game.

"Woking have got some decent players and they're quite lively, but we started really well and 'Crowy' got us off to a great start with his goal so the pressure was off a little bit," continued Beesley.

"I think if it had stayed at nil-nil for 60-70 minutes then maybe the lads might have got a bit nervous. We had a couple of young lads playing and Rory (McAuley), who was fantastic, was playing at home for the first time, so it was important we started well and got ahead to settle everybody down."

Beesley's fourth goal of the season came midway through the second half, but soon after half-time he was denied by a superb save from Woking's impressive young goalkeeper, England Under 19 international Simon Eastwood on loan from Huddersfield.

"He made some good saves and maybe we could have scored a couple more goals, but if you'd offered us 4-1 before the game I think we'd have taken that," said the U's striker.

Looking ahead to the next few games, starting with a trip to Wrexham on Thursday before facing Oxford at home next Thursday (both televised by Setanta TV), Bees called on his team-mates to build on Saturday's win.

"We've got some difficult games coming up but they're all difficult in this league, as Wednesday proved, so we needed to win this one before going into a difficult away trip to Wrexham," he confirmed. "Hopefully we can get something out of it.

"We owed the manager this performance - he's been good to the boys and he's a good manager. A lot of us have played for horrible managers but he's a good manager and he treats us like men and that's how you want to be treated.

"We let him down big time on Wednesday and we owed him that performance today."

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