'Desire and hunger' is bare minimum says Mitchell as Derry City make winning Brandywell return

Goals from City's two best players on the night, Cameron Dummigan and Adam O'Reilly, ensured it was a victorious baptism for the Candy Stripes' new 1.3m grass hybrid pitch with Mitchell delighted by the attitude of the players for the homecoming.

"Massive! Consistency has been the factor all year," admitted the former Crusaders and Linfield players when asked how important it had been to follow up Monday's draw in Tallaght with a positive result.

"We've been really inconsistent and it's tough. We have had to dig in at times and we've come in for a lot of criticism and rightly so. Fans should be frustrated because we are frustrated as much as anyone.

"But I think you can see over the past two games that we do have fight and hunger and desire in that team and that will get us by. That's the bare minimum now, we cannot accept anything less. The boys can't accept anything less and they know that. People have had to step up and they’ve done so but it’s important that we carry this on to Waterford."

Derry experienced a similar 'bounce' on the opening game of their Celtic Park sabbatical recently and Mitchell stressed the need to ensure Friday's victory is built upon.

"That's on us. That's not on the fans, that's on us to drive that," he explained, "That comes with performances, that when you pull the shirt over your head it means everything. The fans will feed off that, the fans will buzz off that.

"I think that's what they saw tonight. To a man the players ran themselves into the ground which is all the fans expect. If we can give them that, I'm sure they will give us everything back."

Dummigan's second 'Goal of the Season' contender in a matter of weeks broke the deadlock against the Drogs with Mitchell highlighting the importance of that opening goal.

"Yeah, 'Dummy' is probably going to get 'Player of the Month' and 'Goal of the Month' now!" he smiled, "Listen, his goal last month (against Dundalk) was superb and as soon as it left his foot tonight, you could see it was headed for the top corner.

"'Dummy' deserves it, he's a very technically gifted player. He can hit them from all angles because hes so good technically so it was great to see it hit the back of the net.

"We did a lot of work on Drogheda during the week and I think their last 13 goals had been off set-plays and you could see what they were bringing off the bench. They're a big, strong physical team and we needed to match that and we did; but when it was on to play, we did that too.

"I thought we could have done a lot better, mind you. There were a lot of excuses last year about the (synthetic) pitch but now we have the grass so we should be playing a bit more on it, being more composed on it. However, I did feel like we were in control of that game."