IT was a bank holiday weekend ruined for me I’m afraid because of the first 45 minutes in both our games — especially against Bath City.
The work rate wasn’t there, neither was the desire or the tempo.
We were back on the pitch for quite a while after the Bath match trying to work out why we haven’t started well in our first five games.
City were 1-0 down after a bad penalty decision against Bath which was a little bit hard to take. While we haven’t played well, we were still in the game at 0-0 and came out in the second-half with the desire and tempo which should have been there from the start.
Obviously them scoring and us missing penalties made the headlines from Monday’s match, but we created enough chances in the second-half to get something out of it.
The referee did okay in the Bath game.
I’m not into hammering referees. He was pretty strong on both penalties and, if I’m perfectly honest, they were correct decisions.
Some referees would have waved play on but he was single-minded on the big decisions and that is all you can ask for.
Marco Adaggio is there to finish and he followed up when Mark Owen had his penalty saved but missed from six or seven yards. However, it’s important that he keeps getting in there trying to get the goals.
Those first two wins don’t seem that long ago and we were back on form against Weston. It was an open game and that is how I like it. I always back our team to score more goals and that is how you get more people to watch.
It was a good game on Saturday. I have read the reports and people were raving about it. There was lots of chances in the first-half, but it changed a bit after the interval because we soaked up a lot of pressure after going down to 10 men.
The Weston game was a great point. You only have to look at the West Ham-Man City match. West Ham went down to 10 men and were beaten 3-0 and it could have been a lot more.
We didn’t. We were big and strong and rode our luck and were good enough to keep a clean sheet.
The second-half was good against Bath and if we had played like that for 90 minutes and drawn 0-0 I would have been pretty happy, but we were miles away in the first-half.
We regrouped and changed a few things at half-time and got going. There was no reason to change anything in that second-half because we dominated it.
We are back in tomorrow and I have asked the players to be ready to train, go through a few things and we start again down at Bromley on Saturday.
In this league you’ll see teams beat other sides unexpectedly and I think Bath thought it was a great result against us because they were all up off the bench on the final whistle.
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