I cannot add much of my own opinion at all to the Boxing Day defeat at Millwall really as I was not at the game and was also unable to follow it at all – bar BBC updates on my phone – due to Christmas visiting!
Well Appy of course could…
His view is that as much as he felt there was a foul in the build-up to the Millwall winner we ‘could’ get ‘stronger’ for this defeat: ‘sometimes defeats make you stronger and wiser. I thought the reason we lost to Millwall was that they were a little bit cuter than us in the ugly side of the game.
‘It looked as if there wasn’t going to be much in the game, with very few chances for either side.
‘It was a poor goal to give away, I think the referee could have been a little bit stronger and given a foul. But as much as it was a foul on Hayden for their goal, it was a clever foul by their striker.
‘Millwall went very direct in the second half and it paid off for them.’
After 2 wins and 2 draws in our previous 4 games this defeat was our first in 5, and Appy’s first since his first game in charge of us against Watford.
Defeat has not disappointed him too much, he just wants us to dust ourselves down and come again at the weekend: ‘I’ve told the lads that nothing changes just because we’ve lost one game. It doesn’t undo all the good work we’ve done over the last five or six weeks.
‘You have to take defeats on the chin. They happen in this league and you have to move on very quickly. We have two tough games coming up, against Leicester and Watford, so bring it on.’
Bring it on indeed!
By all accounts, from what I am told, ‘we deserved more than what we got’ but there you go, as was also said to me it was ‘basically the story of our season’…
What is the story of our season for sure, this and for a good few really, was the lack of a goalscorer!
We have missed Luke Varney, our closest to this, and Appy knows it. He does hope to have him back soon and ‘maybe’ at the weekend perhaps: ‘all managers want someone in their team who will score 15-20 goals a season. We haven’t got that, and probably the closest person we have to that, Luke Varney, has been injured.
‘We would like to find someone who is a real, genuine threat in front of goal, but until that time comes we’ll keep working hard.
‘Luke is improving every day. It will be touch and go for Saturday. He’s desperate to be back in action, and if we can get him in and around the squad it will give everyone a big boost.’
Saturday will soon be here, lets hope that we can bring the curtain down on 2011 with some away cheer, something that we have seen little of on our travels – fortunately a little more at Fratton mind…
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