Manager Keith Hill spoke to Dale PlayerHD after his side’s 3-1 defeat to Bradford City at Spotland, giving his take on the game...
“There’s the referee or the linesman’s mistake for the first goal, whichever way you want to conclude or debate who is responsible for that, and there’s not just one offside, there are two offsides, and the ball that was out of play for the throw in belongs to us.
“We recovered well from that and I don’t think there was an awful lot in the game, but we’re getting really punished and we’re making bad mistakes. We conceded five goals in eight games and now we’ve conceded eight in three. When we actually analyse those eight goals in three, it’s us. I haven’t seen a spectacular goal from any opposition, so that’s the problem.
“It’s not my problem to solve. I trust and believe in the personnel and they’ve got to believe in themselves and each other.
“If you’re making mistakes then you make sure that the next time you got out onto the pitch your first port of call is not to make those mistakes. You’ve got to stop it somewhere and the individual players have got to stop it themselves.
“I’ll trust them and I’ll believe in them. Unless one the players comes to me and says ‘look, I’m a bit down on confidence, I’m making too many mistakes and I need to come out of the team’, then we’ll go with what we’ve got.”
Hill continued: “There wasn’t an awful lot in the game and the third goal concludes it. I’m more disappointed about that because up until that point I think there were two teams who were wrestling and it was a good battle.
“But after we conceded the third goal there was almost a resignation that we had lost the game, even although we had chances. They [Bradford City] controlled possession with the experienced players that they’ve got on the pitch and at times it looked a formality, but Calvin Andrew and Matty Lund have chances, and Lewis Alessandra looked sharp when he came on.
“I’m not too disappointed with the majority of that game but the game is taken away from us from what we’ve stabilised in the first half. We’ve had to come from 1-0 down, and I wasn’t convinced that the opposition deserved to be 1-0 up, and when we got parity I was really, really pleased. I thought we would go on, but we can’t make the mistakes that we did.”
The full interview is available on Dale PlayerHD.