The on-loan Bristol City striker actually scored the winner, pouncing on a parry by visiting keeper Joe Gauci on 25 minutes, but in doing so his ankle seem to collide with the post and left him immediately calling for attention and a stretcher.

“He’s in hospital at the moment but we think it’s going to be a serious one,” said the Boro boss.

“We’ll go down there in a minute and go and see him, but yeah, it doesn’t look good.

“It’s a shame really because we were just starting to see signs of him coming back to form. I thought he started the game brightly and we put him in the team to do that, so he can challenge our front players.

“And he scored a lovely goal, what a striker’s goal should be, but we’re obviously disappointed to see the injury and we don’t know how serious it is.

“We’ll go and see him as a team and we’ll all help him through whatever situation he finds himself in.

“We took a bit of time after (the injury) to get back to being us but once we got to half-time, I thought second half we dealt with the game and dealt what was in front of us and we should have won by more.”

That was the second hurdle Stevenage had to overcome, after Jayden Stockley had got a touch to Elijah Campbell’s cross to put the visitors in front on 10 minutes.

Dan Phillips equalised nine minutes later before Cornick scored, and Boro dominated the second half without finding a third.

Vale boss Jon Brady pointed to a second goal for them chalked off before half-time, seemingly after input from the fourth official.

He said: “We scored what I felt was a legitimate goal, I’ve watched it back, but the fourth official interjects. I’m not sure what the laws are and I’ll definitely speak to Mike Jones (EFL head of refereeing) in the morning and ask how he can make that decision from there.

“He’s 40 metres away when Andre (Gray) taps it in. It should have been 2-2.

“In the end we defended resolutely but you know when you come here, it’s going to be one hell of a battle.

“And you can’t defend the first two set-pieces like we did, it’s not good enough.

“We got a foothold in the game by scoring, got a bit of a lucky break on that one, but then thereafter we conceded from the two set-pieces, which we set ourselves up for.

“It’s a desire to win your battles in both boxes, you’ve got to be standing up to the task and unfortunately we’re not standing up to the task.”