A young United Reserve team went down 3-1 in Rochdale on Wednesday night.

We caught up with Eric Kinder for his thoughts on the game:

"Considering we had a very young side out I thought we started very brightly. We only had Arnie out of the senior pro's, as both Dan and James are still young lads really.

Not only was it a very young side, but that was their third game in five days, and the last 20 minutes did take it's toll.

It's fair to say they struggled a bit - but we can accept that, and there's no problem, it just caught up with them a little.

We also gave a full Reserve team debut to Tom Aldred, who has just turned 16, and he is one of our new intake for next season. He was terrific on the night and was certainly a plus from the evening, and I think he's going to be a real asset for us.

We made a good start on what was a tricky surface and we dominated from the first whistle. Arnie got round the back of their defence early on, and he was brought down for a penalty that he took himself to put us 1-0 up. However, it was 1-1 by half time, and as a coach I'm disappointed with the defending for all three of the Rochdale goals. They were all poor mistakes or bad decisions, which, as I say, is disappointing.

For their equaliser the centre forward got in between our centre-halves and scored a soft header that crept under Chris Howarth's arm and inside the post. Then, in the second half, we had a misunderstanding between Arnie and Chris, and their lad nipped in to put it away. For the third goal Terry Stewart and Dan Kirkup left it to each other and again their player popped it in the back of the net.

However, having said all that, I did think the result was very unfair on our lads. With the way we'd played in the first half I could only see one winner in the game, and that was us.

Overall it was a disappointing result, but we are happy with the performance. Some silly mistakes cost us the game, but I think three games in five days is probably too much to ask of lads of that age - especially when they were up against a fairly experienced Rochdale outfit. Mind you, I think we can all take a lot of heart from some of our lads performances."

Team: Howarth, Arnison, Stewart, M Blake, Krause, Kirkup, M Wood (Hoban 72), Aldred, Brown, Vipond, Madine. Subs: Bradley, Carson, Combe, Wordsworth.