Simon “disappointed to have lost”

Bridgwater and Albion’s head coach Simon Morrell made it quite clear that his side’s performance against Matson was not what he had hoped for.

“Firstly lets take the positives, you can clearly see our attack is developing nicely and yesterday we caused Matson some real problems, at times cutting them to pieces. We need to look at converting a few more of this opportunities, but we are certainly pleased with the processes behind this area of our game”.

“To see us find a level of continuity and consistency in attack with the consistent disruptions in terms of availability is also great to see”.

“I think our supporters are in for a enjoyable second half of the season, with the likes of Oliver Dunn, Rob Thompson, John Roberts, Tim Thompson, Adam Coneybear, Joe Clarke, Dan Kemmish, Shaun Mahoney, Taylor Buller and Jordie Buller all to return at some stage; we certainly don’t need to press the panic button just yet, all things considered we are ticking along quite nicely”.

“Having said that, we are very disappointed to have lost yesterday, as we back ourselves and believe in every member of the group.

“Defensively we were not at the races, which is the mildest way to describe it. Matson were very limited at what they did but they were far superior to us in defence and caused us real problems at the breakdown; in terms of ‘dogging it out’ and showing resilience, we were second best.

“Im not going to be soft on the boys, as we need to find that bit of spike and edge, to see off these tight games.”

The Bridgy boss went on:”It is probably a combination of mental fatigue and one or two boys going missing on the day, but we need to learn from this. We conceded the early collisions and handed Matson, an eight point head start and they were good enough and tenacious enough to cling onto to it at all costs. We back our attack, but left ourselves too much to do and simply ran out of time.

“If we had played 100 minutes then we would have won comfortably, so we need to prioritise these opening exchanges and be more combative. pressure and were not interested defensively from the start. Maybe his is a side effect of knowing our own potential in attack? What ever it is we will put a stop to it.

“I also felt the Matson half backs were exemplary and taught us a lesson on how to play for Field position- their kicking game was outstanding as they caught us out of position time and time again.

“This is a team game and the boys need to go away and reflect on their own contributions, and a number can be very proud, as there were some outstanding performances out there. One or two will no doubt know they could have added more to the collective effort”

This coming Saturday the Albion host Midsomer Norton in the Somerset Cup at College (kick off at 2.30pm) so how was he going to approach that game?

“My mind set is that our supporters deserved a win yesterday and we short changed them and the home crowd deserved better.

“We cant wait two weeks to put things right so will be tough in training on Tuesday and Thursday and want to go out on Saturday against Midsomer Norton and put some points on the board.”

Morrell added: “Having said all of this we have some quality players to come back into our side over the next few weeks and if they had played on Saturday I think that they would have made all the difference.”

Category: Previews / Reports -XV