Town First-Team Coach Ross Embleton gave his views to the media in the wake of his side’s 1-0 defeat to Bolton Wanderers at SN1 this afternoon…
ON THE RESULT AND PERFORMANCE:
“It is very hard to take and it is damaging but I wouldn’t want to go down the lines of saying the wheels are coming off at the moment.
“It wasn’t a convincing performance collectively and I felt we defended the aerial threat we knew we were going to get quite well throughout the game.
“They had one or two moments where Lawrence Vigouroux kept us in it but I just felt that we lacked that threat at the top end of the pitch today.”
ON RAPHAEL ROSSI-BRANCO’S SENDING OFF:
“It is a silly sending-off and you can see the frustration. It shows you that he’s let it get to him but he’s now foolishly going to be missing a number of games.
“We’ll look and talk about it in regards to what happens off the back of it. It is something that isn’t acceptable for one of our more experienced players so it is something that I’m sure we will deal with more internally than externally.”
ON LACK OF CHANCES CREATED:
“It is hard to put your finger on it at the moment because the frustration is still lingering after the defeat.
“I felt that we were a little bit scrappy and untidy with our possession which then never allowed us to get further up the pitch to create those opportunities and chances.
“Our early build-up play never allowed us to get key players into the opposition’s area of the pitch and, when the ball did go into the box, we lacked that conviction and real belief that somebody was going to get on the end of it and go and score.”
ON JON OBIKA’S INJURY:
“We know Jon’s qualities and what he brings to the team so it is obviously very frustrating that we lost Jon to something very, very simple with the way that he turned and went down yesterday in training.
“He’s going to be someone who we will miss.
“There’s a problem with Jon’s knee and it was a twist really, there was no one near him, it wasn’t a tackle and it wasn’t something that he pulled up with.
“We’ll know probably by tomorrow exactly what problem Jon has got and to how long we expect him to be out for.”
ON CONOR THOMAS’ INJURY:
“Conor got a knock on the hip really, really early in the game and he managed to get through the first-half, but he came out late for the second-half.
“He went in, had treatment, iced it and was on the bike trying to keep himself mobile and keep the blood circulating in the area.
“It was more of a severe knock to that bone in and around his hip.”
ON HOW TO TURN TOWN’S FORM AROUND:
“We keep working. The last few weeks have been very, very difficult in terms of the results have not been anywhere near what we want, but we’ve had a continuous run of games which doesn’t allow you to do the work that will hopefully turn our fortunes around.
“This week we’ve got a clear week, we can work a lot more tactically on where we feel we’re not performing to anywhere near we can and we haven’t got the interruption of another game during the week so we’ve got a good few days to make sure we give everything to try and get a positive result next week.”
