91Èȱ¬

Exeter City manager Matt Taylor says top scorer Matt Jay's form is down to the work he put in during lockdown.

The 25-year-old has scored four goals in City's past two games and has found the net 17 times so far this season.

"During the first part of lockdown we gave them individual programmes. You saw who came back fit and in a position where they'd actually done the programme at home," said Taylor.

"MJ did that programme, but did more, he came back a different animal."

Taylor added: "He came back being able to cover the ground in a lot less time, his stride pattern was different and he looked a slightly different athlete.

"He's never going to be the tall profile or the bigger profile simply due to his size, but the fact that the distance he covers and the amount of sprints he does in a game has increased from recent seasons has added to his ability to be there and thereabouts when it matters in and around the 18-yard box."

Jay, who has come through the club's academy, is enjoying his best run in the Exeter first team, scoring more goals this season than in the rest of his time at the club combined - a spell which goes all the way back to September 2013 when he made his debut.

"He's waited long enough so no one's more pleased than myself in terms of MJ's contributions," added Taylor to 91Èȱ¬ Sport.

"All credit has to go to him. There's players within our group who came back in a poor state physically because they couldn't motivate themselves to do the programme we distributed.

"When you're here day in, day out and you've got your coaches and your strength and conditioning staff and your physios saying 'you've got to run this distance in this amount of time' it's easy to do because you just get you head down as a footballer and you do it because you've got 10 or 11 team-mates alongside you doing exactly the same thing.

"When there's no one else watching you, that's when you learn the most about a footballer."