Boss rues bad display at Stevenage, but looks at bigger picture.
Manager Paul Cox insists it isn’t all doom and gloom, despite today’s bitterly disappointing 3-0 defeat to mid-table Stevenage at the Lamex Stadium.Our team were left with a mountain to climb as goals by Chris Whelpdale and Charlie Lee inside the opening five minutes put the hosts in a commanding position.
Whelpdale scored again late on to add gloss to Stevenage’s victory, and although our boss admits it was one of our poorest displays so far this term, he remains fully focussed on the bigger picture.
Cox said: “It was a bad performance and a bad result for us.
“What we’ve got to do is make sure that we learn from these defeats. The young players and those that are acclimatising to League Two have got to learn quickly and we need a little bit of help from a little bit of experience.
“So it’s not all doom and gloom. We’ve had a half-decent start to the season, we’ve won five, lost five, and what I’ve said to the boys is we need a little bit of consistency now in our game-to-game ratio and our ratio over 90 minutes.
“If we can do that, we’ll have a successful season.”
Reflecting on the match itself, he continued: “Realistically, the game was over after 10 minutes. The first thing you do away from home is get a good base to start from, yet we gave ourselves a hill to climb.
“When you’re two-nil down away from home after five minutes, you’re chasing the game. That’s when you look for individuals, collectively and individually, to step forward, but I just thought we were a yard off [the pace] probably all over the park today.
“In the next 20 minutes from when we conceded the two goals, we had enough chances to equalise or even go in front.”
Cox also admitted that his players had a positive and lengthy discussion in the dressing room, following the final whistle.
“We’ve just been beaten three-nil, so we had a good chat with the players,” stated our manager.
“We’ve been analytical of the build up to the game, the actual 90 minutes, where we can improve and where things went wrong. It was a positive discussion of where we went wrong today.”
