Jason Kennedy on learning from disappointment
We spoke to midfielder Jason Kennedy ahead of training on Thursday morning about the season so far."It's been a bit of a disappointing end to the season," he said. "The performance on Tuesday was a bit flat but I thought we played a lot better in the second half and got some good balls into the box. Unfortunately we couldn't take our chances and there was a massive disappointment in the changing room.
"The play-offs are just about out of reach so the lads are massively disappointed. We just want to do well in our last three games and finish as high up the table with as many points as we can."
"We had a lot of opportunities to get into the play-offs," he admitted. "We had games in hand and there was a confidence within the lads that we would get there. For whatever reason we haven't taken those opportunities and as a team that's something we've got to learn from.
"It's hard to pick out one individual thing that's affected our performances and results. As players we've done everything the same since the turn of the year, we've trained and had our rest, so it's difficult to say what went wrong with the results.
"We don't want to make excuses but the floods did have an affect. We weren't training at our usual places and we had to travel for our home games. The club houses we had were also affected but we can't use that as an excuse because the gaffer and the staff have looked after us in the best way they can."
"The lads will all be positive in the lead up to the Crawley game," he told us. "We'll be trying to impress in training to make sure we get a starting place on Saturday. We all want to do well because we don't want the season to fizzle out. We want to make sure we finish as high as we can.
"We want to finish strongly so we're going into next season with a few wins under our belt. Hopefully we'll be able to use this season as a learning curve and push on again. The recent results have been frustrating, and we haven't really put in the performances we did at the start of the season, but we know we're better than that."
Looking ahead to the weekend trip to Crawley, he said: "Our performance against them earlier in the season was one of our strongest. Teams change throughout the year though so we know it will be a difficult game.
"We at least want to make sure we finish in the top half, as close to the play-offs as possible, to give ourselves something to build on next season. Hopefully that will be the case and we'll give the fans something to get excited for as we look towards next season."
And on his personal performances, he said: "I'm my own biggest critic so I've been a bit disappointed with my performances of late. It's something I'll work on and I think I'll be stronger for it.
"As I say, we are disappointed with what happened this week but you can look back at games where you think 'if only we'd held on things would be better' but over the season I think those sorts of things balance themselves out. You can score in the last minute one week and concede the next week. Over the whole season I think you end up where you deserve to be.
"Although we've missed out on the play-offs I think it's been a good season overall. You look at the two cup games against big clubs and they were massive for the club during the floods.
"There are positives to take but if we'd managed to make that last play-off place it would have been a great season. All we can do is learn and build on the good work we've done.
"We've got quite a lot of young players in the squad and I think they'll definitely learn a lot from this experience. That will make them better players. They'll be ready to go for next season, as we all will.
"Looking ahead I know the gaffer will definitely want us to be up there. The players will be the same but let's not forget we have three games still to play. We'll go about doing them properly before we start thinking about next season."
United PlayerHD subscribers can see an interview with Jason Kennedy now. Click HERE to go to the PlayerHD platform. Follow the same link for more information on United PlayerHD, and to subscribe.
"Although we've missed out on the play-offs I think it's been a good season overall. You look at the two cup games against big clubs and they were massive for the club during the floods.
"There are positives to take but if we'd managed to make that last play-off place it would have been a great season. All we can do is learn and build on the good work we've done.
"We've got quite a lot of young players in the squad and I think they'll definitely learn a lot from this experience. That will make them better players. They'll be ready to go for next season, as we all will.
"Looking ahead I know the gaffer will definitely want us to be up there. The players will be the same but let's not forget we have three games still to play. We'll go about doing them properly before we start thinking about next season."
United PlayerHD subscribers can see an interview with Jason Kennedy now. Click HERE to go to the PlayerHD platform. Follow the same link for more information on United PlayerHD, and to subscribe.
Click HERE to see a clip from this interview on our YouTube channel. Follow the same link for more FREE content right from the heart of the club.
