The changing room must be pretty despondent after that late turnaround?
Yeah, disappointed obviously, particularly after it happened so late, but it’s part of the pain of football and when things happen in those circumstances you’ve just got to take it. Can’t fault the players’ effort or commitment. It was always going to be a tough game anyway at Wolves. We just couldn’t hold out.
You were visibly frustrated on the touchline and shouting, what frustrated you most about the performance?
We’ve made a couple of changes as well further up and it’s not going to be as fluent but I just felt we could have been more positive, especially in the first half. Second half I thought it wasn’t too bad but I just thought and maybe because we were winning the game, I think a lot of the guys in the back of their minds, they haven’t played in a while and there was a little bit of self preservation there to get us through to the end of the game. It’s all understandable stuff because of the line up we had out there.
Eric Dier and Ben Davies did well for the majority of the game, giving Wolves very few chances, what can you say about their performances?
Both of them and Emerson, and even for guys like Brennan and Pierre, who haven’t really started many games because we’ve had a pretty settled line-up. Particularly those two guys coming in [Dier and Davies], I thought their commitment, their endeavour to play our way was there for the whole game. They held out in the end. I think you could see they were feeling towards the end but they didn’t let their performance levels drop.
For the most part, Wolves didn’t have many really big chances, I think Vic had one or two saves to make but obviously at the end there, I think the first goal was a really good goal and we probably ran out of steam in the last few minutes. Wolves, particularly with the crowd behind them, were able to lift themselves.
There were a few quick free-kicks towards the end where you lost the ball, was that frustrating or is the quick kicks what you want?
No, no that didn’t frustrate me at all. That’s part of our football. From my perspective, that wasn’t the stuff… As I said, I thought there were times particularly in the first half when we had really good control of the game and could have been a little bit more positive with our play.
ady said the character and the commitment. I don’t dismiss that. There’s a massive effort to go out against a strong opponent here at home. The guys are playing their first games of the year, you’re changing three out of a back four so it’s fairly disruptive, especially when guys haven’t played at all. There’s a lot of positives to take from it, they’ll be better for the experience, they’ll be stronger, so plenty of positives.
A first goal for Brennan Johnson, could that be a confidence booster for him?
I hope so. It’s not the only measure. He’s one of the ones I think could have been a bit more positive for us in the first half but again Brennan’s not really had a clear run at it. He’s had a real disrupted beginning to his career for us and I think the more we can get him into these situations there’s definitely goals in him. There’s more of a goal threat in him but again you could see at the end he ran out of legs because he hasn’t played a lot of football since the start of the year.
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