Luton Town match reaction from Sean O'Hanlon
Team captain Sean O’Hanlon gave us his reaction to the opening day fixture against Luton Town on Saturday.
“It was a tough first game, but that’s the way the first one of the season always is,” he said. “I’ve heard that Luton are favourites to win this league so we knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
“They started the game very well, and we didn’t. I think we dominated in the second half but we just couldn’t get that goal.”
“If you’re not playing well you hope you can see it through to half time so that you can take it on again,” he told us. “You want to keep that clean sheet, to give yourselves a chance, but unfortunately we didn’t manage to do that.
“I don’t think this will be too much of a knock to the confidence. What we have to do is look at the second half performance and see how we pretty much dominated it. If we continue to play like that then we should start to pick up three points regularly.”
“We’ve got some good strikers at the club and I’m sure we’ll start to see those chances converted as the games tick over,” he insisted. “We saw the type of striker we’ll be coming up against in Paul Benson because he was clever and intelligent with how he did things. We coped with it for the majority of the game and I think we had plenty we could take from the performance.”
“The system changed for the second half because we came in at half time and the gaffer said right away that we needed to be more positive in our approach,” he said. “It seemed to suit us better and we worked in pre-season on being able to change the way we were doing things if it wasn’t going well.”
And on being handed the captain’s armband, he said: “It’s always an honour to lead Carlisle United out. It’s not very nice to go a goal down though, and you feel like you’ve let the fans down when you get beat. The boys are disappointed but we go again on Monday.
“The fans were great for us and it’s good if they can keep getting behind us. We’re all trying our hardest to get promotion this season and it would be nice if they could come along and help us. We want to give them performances and results they deserve as quickly as possible. Like I say, it’s a game where we come away feeling disappointed, but if people judge us on the second half then that’s the type of performance we’re looking to achieve this season.”
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