Neil Harris has praised his Cambridge United players for finding a way to pick up all three points during yesterday’s 2-1 victory away at Barnsley.

The win continued United’s impressive start to life back in League One, and they go into Tuesday night’s home clash against Wycombe Wanderers sitting fifth in the table with just a one-point deficit to leaders Bradford City.

In terms of the performance at Oakwell, there was plenty of room for improvement.

But thanks to second-half goals from Ben Knight and Shayne Lavery – the latter scoring in stoppage time – the U’s dug it out.

Harris said: “We were poor today, especially in the first half. We were so un-Neil Harris-like. The first half is probably a reality for everybody, me included.

“We’ve fought tooth and nail to get where we are and what we’re doing and what we’re achieving.

“We have to keep doing it because we’ve got no God-given right to be winning games of football at this level.

“We don’t get out of the bottom four on budgets at this level, so what the players are achieving is miraculous. I’m so proud of them for doing it.

“That first half was probably a reminder. We’ve come up against a struggling Barnsley side that are very, very young. They’re even younger than us, but they were better than us in the first half, and that’s the reality.

“Their intensity to press was too much for us. I didn’t lose my rag at half-time, I didn’t shout at the players, contrary to what a few thousand people might think! I was calm, and just said that wasn’t acceptable for us and not what we want to be.

“We’ve drawn a lot of plaudits with how good we’ve been with the ball and how exciting we’ve been, but today we didn’t have to do that. We just had to find an identity and a way to win a game of football. Huge credit to the players that we did that in the second half.”