First-half goals from Michael Mellon, making his first league start for Stevenage after seven substitute appearances, and Josh Magennis had them in charge at the interval and even with a few brief moments of pressure in the first 15 minutes of the second half, they wrapped up the victory with a late Phoenix Patterson strike.

“I think it’s one of the best 90 minutes of my time here, to be honest with you,” said Revell. “It was a really top performance from start to finish.

“And the old Mike Bassett too, 4-4-2! We felt that Michael Mellon could really threaten him in behind, with what he brings to the team.

“Josh [Magennis] has put a lot of effort up front on his own and we just felt that we could use them both against a really good team that have started the season brilliantly.

“Dan Kemp has played that role before and it was a tough choice between Ben Broggio and Phoenix Patterson but both of them had points in the game and showed their qualities.

“I suppose when you win, [changing formation] is the right thing to do, when you lose, it’s not.

“But I think everybody will be leaving here really proud of the team.”

And he called it a statement performance.

“Our biggest challenge is can we back it up,” said the Boro boss. “I was really disappointed on Saturday after Bradford, I genuinely felt they weren’t 2-0 better than us.

“If we played like this on Saturday, we would have won.

“We just have to keep believing, keep building and I love walking into that dressing room and seeing what I see from every single one of them.

“They give so much, every single player.

“Hopefully people will look at that and see Stevenage have beaten Plymouth and it is a big win.

“I’m really pleased for everybody here because they work incredibly hard.”

Tom Cleverley, though, was scathing of his own side’s performance, although he took full responsibility.

The Pilgrims boss said: “We’re not doing the basics well enough and for that I can only apologise to the supporters that made the journey this evening.

“The bare minimum I demand is to compete, and we’ve not done that in the last two games.

“And if you don’t compete, if you don’t win your duels, if you don’t land on the second balls, if you don’t run or fight, then you’re going to find it difficult to score goals and difficult to keep it out of the back of your net.

“That is what this looked like and there are a lot of questions from the last two games and it’s my job to provide the answers and real clarity and [ahead of] Saturday.”