Eric Kinder gave us his reaction to the away 1-0 defeat against Rochdale:

"It was frustrating really. I think it was two senior sides. I got a phone call this morning from the Rochdale youth team coach (Chris Beech) who I am very friendly with. Just to warn us that the first team had travelled down to Aldershot last night and the manager (Keith Hill) had decided that the seven substitutes, because they hadn't played for a long time, they were going to play them all today. As it turned out we played a senior side, basically about eight professionals, a few of them were younger ones.

"I thought for reserve team level it was a decent game, I thought it was played at a decent tempo. To me it is funny as I have just talked to Paul Thirlwell, who played for 60 to 65 minutes, and he said that it had 0-0 written all over it. To be honest, it had.

"If you look at the goal, I am not too bothered about it hitting a bobble and going over Mark (Gillespie). These things happen, they always will. It will be on a video next year will that one. But it is leading up to the goal that has disappointed me, Tom (Aldred) has gone for a header he should never have gone for, he was never going to get it. Conor (Tinnion) has not tracked his man back in, Jonny Blake has gone over and not really marked in the box before it has come out, and then it bobbled over Mark.

"We are so disappointed with the goal to be honest. If I am really brutally honest I didn't think we looked like scoring. So I can understand Paul's comment, they didn't look like scoring to be fair and it was, it had a 0-0 game written all over it, but it was a stupid goal to let in.

"I know it doesn't matter too much to the manager, and rightly so. He is not interested in whether the youth team win the league and he is not interested in the reserves winning the league, as long as we have got some players to push on and win games in the first team. But as youth team manager and joint reserve team manager I want to win the league and it has put a bit of a dent in it today, and they have just got the edge over us.

"But I thought it was pretty even, it was a better reserve game than we have had in the past where we have played an extension of the youth team, it is just like playing a youth team fixture on a weekday afternoon. Today it was mostly seniors and you could tell with the pace of the game.

"I said at half-time that with a little bit more luck we would be in front. We had a bad ten minutes where we lost our shape, lost our defensive shape definitely, and it cost us a goal. Other than that ten minutes I thought in the first half we were the better side, and I was quite happy with the way we played.

"I was quite happy with the way we played all game to be honest. You ask senior players to come out and use it for what reserve team football is for. For them to go out and get match fitness, put pressure on the first team manager to put them in the squad. I think overall most of the pros who played today did that.

"I just said to the lads at full-time that the pros did what we wanted them to do. We wanted them to get 90 minutes under their belt, the lads who didn't play at Leeds last night and Brentford on Saturday. We wanted them to get something out of it and I think the vast majority of them got what they needed, and that was game time on grass.

"The reserve league this year is probably a waste of time if we are looking at it like that. We want to play every week but with the postponements over the last couple of weeks, I think if you look at our reserve fixtures in March we have a great run, I think we play every week in March. The first team play every Tuesday in February so we could probably do without playing that many reserve games, but in March we have got a good run in to the end of the season.

"But the way we are as a club, we don't know what sort of reserve team we are going to put out from one week to another. We had a senior side out today and next week we might have the youth team out. So we could do with more reserve games but probably say within our own environment which this is, but it certainly needs looking at."

United - Gillespie, Kane, Aldred, Murphy, Blake, Thirlwell (Lakeland 71), Burns, Bridge-Wilkinson, Bowman (McKenna 63), Offiong, Tinnion. Subs - Ball, Swinglehurst, Davison.