Joey, that was a proper game of two halves. That second half must have been a difficult watch for you.
It’s a tough moment for us as a group; lads are lower on confidence than you would like.
We get a great start and go 1-0 up in the game and possibly should have got a second or third. There was a little bit of a break in play and we didn’t seem to recover after that.
A long punt down the pitch was not dealt with and a team that had created nothing found themselves 1-1 in the game and I think that just ate into the lads’ confidence.
Second half, they kept trying and having a go, but we lacked a lot of quality today. It’s a tough moment but we’ve just got to keep scrapping through it.
Games can turn on small moments and just before their equaliser, Jarell had a glorious chance to make it 2-0 and then it would probably have been a very different result.
Goals change games and it’s Murphy’s Law for us at the moment. In a three-game week, we had a bought of illness rip through the group, and defenders are not dealing with things.
We get up in the game, which we want to be and then manage somehow to lose the game.
It’s frustrating, it’s difficult, but luckily for us we had a good spell in the middle part of the season and we have got a bit of breathing room so we can hopefully correct this course that we’re on at the moment and start looking back up the table.
We know you have got a young group but that lack of resilience must frustrate you as a manager?
It’s part and parcel of it, you know the risks you take when you recruit a younger set and there are upsides to it. As a coach, I believe in them and in my career it has certainly reaped dividends for me as a coach.
At this moment, it’s tough. We have got to get the new lads in the win column. Jarell, Ellery, Lamare and Calum have come into the group and they have not tasted victory yet, and it must be tough because they are honest kids and good players.
They are low in there and it’s our job as a group, the lads who have been in the tough spells before to keep them going through it and pull them through this tough moment.
Certainly, for Jarell and Lamare, they have played a couple of senior games for the under-21s at their parent clubs and they have lost those as well. I was trying to think what it must be like for them to have never won a senior game. That has got to be a real source of frustration for them.
Yeah, it will be tough for them, but they are going to have really good and really long careers, touch wood.
This is what they have come to learn and this is part of being a footballer. It is easy, football, when you are playing well and you are winning and everybody is giving you the plaudits, but the real footballers, the proper footballers, for me, are forged in the adversity, in the tough moments.
We’ve been in tough moments before as a group. I think back to the start of League Two and Barrow away and Exeter away. You draw strength from that as a group.
We’ve been in tight spots before and this is as tough as it’s been for us in probably a year. We have to keep fighting through and showing that character and resilience that we know will stand us in good stead once the tide turns.
Do you need players to roll their sleeves up and just dig in a bit more?
No, I think they are having a right go. We are just a bit lower in confidence.
Couttsy has had a bought of illness and has had to miss games, Sam Finley has had a retrospective ban, Lofty has gone out with a ban.
Jordy Rossiter looks like he is going to miss the season. Lewis Gibson, hopefully, is on the mend and should come back into the squad all being well for next week, which I think will really help us.
We have just got to keep battling and scrapping through. Gasheads, they know, this club has been through a lot of turmoil, certainly in the time I’ve been here and a lot longer beyond that and they are well versed in tough moments. This is one of them.
But I spoke to the lads in there and said 'Look, this is not something like Nick is facing that is out of his control and is in the lap of the gods or the doctors. This is something that is absolutely in our control’.
So there will be no sulking from us, no excuses. We’ll be back on the training pitch and ready to rock and roll at Oxford next Saturday.
Joey, can you break down what happened with the second goal? People in the stadium were bemused by it. Not only was there some controversy but it was a bit Keystone Cops in there.
It was. Without criticising the officials, I’m trying my best not to do it, I do feel was a foul on Jarell. It wasn’t given, but we still have opportunities to deal with in and we must do better.
We will speak about that internally because I don’t want to drag the lads’ confidence down further by naming them in the media, but you have got to expect things to go wrong as a defender and be pessimistic.
Jarell is possibly fouled, but we’ve got to be ready to catch any mistake or opportunity for the opponent. We didn’t do that and we got punished.
It takes the energy out of the stadium. The fans were excellent and driving the team on, but we needed that second goal. That second goal would have elevated the confidence levels and settled everybody down and we probably would have not looked back from there.
But that didn’t happen and we’re on the canvas because we can’t manage to clear our box or keep the ball out of our net.
We gave the ball away needlessly for the second goal and have a couple opportunities to clear and moments of good goalkeeping and good defending, but you can’t keep blocking shots. We had to exit the box and we didn’t manage to do that and we lost the game.
James Connolly came off in the final 10 minutes. Was that an injury or a tactical thing?
No, we have to look at a few different things. I think he had a tough afternoon and Luca Hoole gets forward and links in a little bit better.
If we left Beefy and Jarell on, we were looking for Lewis Gordon to step in and go and join attacks because we were chasing it, and Luca the same down the other side. That was part of it.
I wasn’t dragging him off or anything like that. It was to make a more offensive back three.
Confidence is obviously an issue and it is not that they are losing the will for a battle. It is that you are straying so far from what you’re good at. In that second half, there were so many straight long balls. Do you think players are panicking in this moment?
You know what we’re like in terms of we want to get the ball on the floor and play. We score, we’re playing some great stuff and it comes from a great move out wide.
Scotty Sinclair and Gibbo get the other side and get the ball in and a great finish from John, who I thought was excellent today.
And then we stopped playing. I said to the lads at half time ‘We’ve got the wind, there is no point in going long, we’ve got to move the ball through the thirds’.
But we’re not out there doing it for them and when you’ve got four or five new lads, all who have not won a game since they have been here, confidence is at a lower ebb than you would want it to be.
I think it’s more to do with the lads who have been here, there are some lads who are struggling for a bit of form and a bit of confidence.
Again, from our perspective, all we can do is turn up and work harder. It will turn, it’s a ball going in off somebody’s backside.
Ideally, preparing from the game on Tuesday, the last thing you want is five or six lads spewing up and having diarrhoea and it’s kind of ripped through the group.
We still had a strong enough team out there even though some of them were in that illness group. Obviously, a few lads didn’t make the team with it.
From our perspective, we get in the ascendency and that first goal. That should be brilliant. Burton, who want to play for lineouts and scrums, have got to come out, but actually we just played their game.
They kept kicking it and we kept kicking it back and all of a sudden we’re fighting their fight, so you are right to point that out, but confidence settles people down and when you have got a few people in there who are confident, they speak to the lads and say ‘Let’s get our hands on the ball and play’, but we didn’t do that today.
It’s not just confidence on the pitch, that first goal for Burton completely sucked the life out of the whole stadium. It was a shock because you had played so well and it was against the run of play. That is another challenge you have to deal with at the moment because earlier in the season when you fell behind, the Mem was absolutely rocking and that forced you back into form in certain games.
Yeah and we’ve had that before. In League Two, we had that and we had to work our way through it and earn that support. It’s up to us to keep the fans with the team.
That comes from endeavour and effort, but you can see we are not coming up short for that. It’s just not going the way it normally does.
It just feels like everything that can go wrong is going wrong. If it’s not retrospective bans by the FA or refereeing decisions, it’s illness running through the camp.
It’s football and I’ve been in it for a long time. There are ebbs and flows. This is a tough moment for us, but we have made it through a lot tougher spots than this.
Luckily for us, we had a great spell in the middle part of the season and we got a lot of points on the board. At his moment, we’re not putting enough points on the board and we need to get our act together.
Oxford is an interesting game to go into. It is always a well-attended away day and there is a bit of rivalry between the two clubs. There is going to be spice in that game, no matter what.
Both teams. They lost today and they are six defeats in seven. We are five defeats in six, so it’s two teams lower than a snake’s belly and it will probably end up 5-5 or something like that, so who knows.
It’s another game we can win and luckily, we’re in a division where you can win every game if you’re at it.
At this moment in time, we’re not firing on all cylinders and if you’re not firing on all cylinders, you can lose any game as well in this division.
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