Town Head Coach Luke Williams reacted to his side’s 3-1 FA Cup First Round Replay defeat to Eastleigh to members of the local press earlier this evening…
“It was men against boys tonight and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way to our players, I think it is more of a literal sense,” he said.
“There is a team there with hundreds of games behind them and it showed tonight.
“We struggled to keep the intensity that we showed on the weekend and we’ve come off second best.
“We were prepared and the players knew what the opposition were going to bring to the table, but tonight their will was stronger and we’ve fallen victim to not maintaining standards.
“Goals always change games but it looked as though a few players were struggling to recover from the first goal and, like that, it can of course snowball very quickly and people start to make bad decisions.
“Players aren’t full of energy anymore and they start to doubt things and that’s what you saw tonight.
“The second goal was very disappointing because they had so far to go and the pass is fantastic and the finish is of the very highest quality, but nevertheless it is a long way for them to travel to score.
“We expect the players to be able to deal with that one straight long pass and then if they don’t deal with that then deal with the second one and so on, but a catalogue of errors led to the goal.
“This Eastleigh team are excellent, they managed the game very well and they were able to stop there being a collapse and they did that very well.
“We’re struggling to find consistency.
“There will have to be more discussions and more hard work. The players will have to very quickly get on board with plenty of new ideas that Tim (Sherwood) has brought to the club and I’m sure they are going to pay dividends, but they need to get clued in quickly and they need to show that they can take instructions and put them into practice.”
