Greg Abbott on the Bournemouth defeat
United manager Greg Abbott gave us his reaction to the FA Cup defeat shortly after full time on Saturday evening.
“We’re obviously really disappointed because we wanted to be in this competition,” he said. “But we have to hold our hands up and say they were better than us. We needed to try and combat that with work rate and determination and there wasn’t enough of that. They are a big club in terms of spending power and you have to roll your sleeves up and dig deep in games like this. We didn’t get enough of that and they found us out.
“We’re missing some big players but we keep talking about that. When you have this situation it’s an opportunity for other people to step in. Maybe we were too young today and they have showed their experience to get the result, but we look at the eleven and we think we should be better than we were.
“The home form is being talked about and that’s because people only judge you on what they see. We need one or two victories to bring that belief back. The fans, who were magnificent by the way, have shown again that they are waiting for us to provide some energy and spark. We need to start doing that now because the results here simply aren’t good enough.
“We are biding our time in many ways until we get our big players back. We can guarantee that when we have a full squad to pick from we’ll have some nice problems again. I think any team would miss the likes of Lee Miller, Danny Cadamarteri and James Berrett and we have others who are doing their best to play through niggling injuries for us.
“We’ve got Chants [Chris Chantler] playing through a heel problem and we took a gamble with Frank Simek who has been doing minimal training with a knee problem. He didn’t last for us and I thought Valentin [Gjokaj] showed that he can be aggressive when he came on. It wasn’t an ideal game for him to get his first appearance but he did well.
“We were matching them up until they got that first goal and that seems to be the way it’s going for us at the moment. They take a shot, it hits somebody and it goes in. It would be nice if a few of them went our way every now and then. Their second goal came really quickly after that and then you are chasing it against a very good side.
“All we can do is keep working really hard and try to keep the players in a very positive frame of mind. It’s another tough one next week but that’s where we have to get out there and make life difficult for them [Sheffield United]. We are much better than we showed today but we won’t get results without that aggression and energy which has been missing from our home games.
“Like I say, the fans are sticking with us and I think that’s because they know where we’re at. They are doing their bit and it’s up to us to repay that with the level of performance which will bring us the results everyone so desperately wants.”
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