Guy Whittingham hailed ice-cool Matt Tubbs after his nerveless late penalty earned Crawley a 1-0 win over Peterborough United.

Tubbs cheekily chipped his spot-kick down the middle as goalkeeper Bobby Olejnik dived to his right as Crawley completed the double over Posh.

It was the Tubbs’ fifth goal in as many games since joining on loan from Bournemouth and first team coach Whittingham was full of praise for the striker.

Whittingham said: “I don’t think there was too much argument about the penalty. It was a penalty for sure but I wasn’t expecting that from Matt.

“He practises penalties regularly but I’ve never seen him practise one like that. The pressure was on him after scoring one last week (at Walsall) when he buried it in the corner.

“The opposition keeper would have seen that and would have anticipated him doing something similar so it was clever to chip it down the middle. I’m not sure I would have said that if he’d missed though!”

Crawley have now taken seven points from their last three matches to climb to 13th in League One, 14 points behind sixth-placed Peterborough with four games in hand.

It was their first home league game since December 29 and Whittingham admitted the poor state of the pitch made it difficult for both teams.

He added: “It wasn’t a great game but that was because the pitch cut up. I thought we started the game very well and created three good chances in the opening 20 minutes but we then let them back into it.

“That was always going to happen as Peterborough are a good team. The pitch is a bit of a leveller but both sides tried to play football and you have to give the players credit for that.”