Manager Russell Slade was not a happy man at full time in our five three defeat to Bournemouth at the weekend.
With David Marshall and the defence keeping three clean sheets in our last four games a defensive capitulation like that wasn’t on the cards, and having conceded after less than a minute, Slade told Wales Online that it simply wasn’t good enough and he had let the players know it at full time.
‘You can’t win if you don’t defend properly. The most disappointing factor is that we were one goal down within a minute. It’s difficult enough to go a goal down away without conceding that early against a team who are heading to the top of the table. Credit to my players because they never gave up, but you can’t win if you don’t defend properly. We didn’t close Bournemouth down well enough.’
Slade goes on to say that having worked so hard to get us back into the game at 2-1, we went on to shoot ourselves in the foot again, and again we worked hard to get it back to 3-2 and at that stage he thought it was ‘game on’ but we needed to get to 3-3 and we couldn’t do it, and they took control again.
‘Bournemouth produced their fourth goal. We need to start games as we started the second half. That’s the contrast. It was an open game and highly unpredictable. Having scored three goals away it’s disappointing to have nothing to show for that. We go home bitterly disappointed with goals we conceded and how we conceded.’
Slade says all we can do is learn from this, take it on to the training ground and ensure that we improve further from it, but given some of our passages of play it was eye opening for him and he feels he knows where we are in the league and what we need to do to kick on, so despite the disappointment there are things he can take from it.
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