Manager Keith Hill delivered an honest assessment of his side’s 1-0 defeat to Rotherham United at the Crown Oil Arena…
“We’re not playing goal scoring football at the minute which is a problem.
“If you just look at the last five minutes of the game, we’ve had two corners and two free headers, and we’ve not punished the opponents.
“We aren’t being effective enough in front of goal and it’s spoiling performances because there’s not an awful lot wrong with the performance, but we need to find that attacking rhythm and put the chances away when we get them.
“Their goal is a catalogue of mini negative mistakes/ a negative bounce – that’s whether it’s a free-kick or not, whether or not the free-kick is then going out of play as it’s sent in, so it’s now a corner instead of a goal-kick, and then it’s just a negative rhythm that we didn’t put our positive stamp on.
“There’s a negative bounce at the minute but some of the performances are more than acceptable and I’ll accept the team performance today.
“I see the match affecting smaller things which are the big detail and we’ve got to get them right, whether it’s the first phase or the second phase, we have to be more responsible when we’re attacking the opponent’s goal, because the structure of the team is pretty good and that’s the first goal we’ve conceded for a while, so we have to get the other side of the game right. Every single player is responsible for scoring goals.”
He continued: “The players did enough to get their opportunities that I wanted in the last 10 minutes, never mind before that, but it’s just a case of converting them.
“Bradden Inman has got to score. It’s a key component of winning a football match and it’s not just Bradden, but that situation has to be a goal, and we’ve scored them goals in previous seasons. I believe we had enough opportunities to at least get something out of the game and in seasons gone by we probably would have won that game.
“At the minute we are not firing going forward. We’ve sorted out our shape with respect to making sure that we are avoiding too many opportunities for the opposition. They really need to work hard to create now and I think we’ve dealt with Kieffer Moore pretty well.
“There are goals in our team, there’s no question about that, but they have to make sure that they’re being clinical and clean, when these opportunities come along.”
And Hill was less than impressed by the “gamesmanship” tactics of the opposition.
“It’s difficult for the referee because within a side that’s quite physical, there’s a lot of play acting as well, and that’s where the referee has got to try and work it out.
“You would look at the stats and say we’re probably more physical because we’ve got a higher yellow card count and we probably had a higher foul count, but I think if you were to sum it up and actually look through it, I think more than 40-percent of the free-kicks that we given away were play acting from the opponents. Is it sportsmanship or gamesmanship? I’m ok with it being gamesmanship, but what I don’t expect is the referee not to see it as gamesmanship.
“The referee should be able to see through it a little bit more and I think he got more than a few calls wrong, because he was falling for the players’ gamesmanship rather than sportsmanship.”
Watch the full interview on iFollow.