Following our first home league defeat of the season, Mark Hughes gave us his thoughts on the Rochdale match.
Speaking to CUTV, he said: “We've just been beaten by the better team today in terms of what they were trying to do and certainly their game plan. They were able to execute it better than we were and obviously on the back of the York performance and result, I felt we needed to change something. Just to give us a better chance to get a foothold in the game because clearly we understood how Rochdale approached the game very similarly in a lot of aspects of their play.
"I felt we needed to improve in terms of affecting the opposition given the way we played the other night. When you do make changes we need everybody to commit to it and unfortunately we didn't do that very well and very quickly we needed to change shape and personnel once again. So that's a disappointment but give the opposition credit, they were better than us today.”
Following in a similar vein to Tuesday’s defeat, the timing of the goals this afternoon were poorly timed for Mark Hughes’ side.
“It’s really important to just stay in the game in the key moments. I've said time and time again you need to be really rock solid in the opening period and the ten minutes either side of each half and the last ten minutes if you're trying to see out a result. So we're having a little bit of a struggle and a battle to be able to do that at the moment.”
It was yet another tough test for the Blues this afternoon as they came across an accomplished Rochdale side.
“The opposition were very good. They did things a little bit quicker, they were a little bit stronger physically and in terms of their mentality they understood what they needed to do to affect us and execute the game plan so credit to them. It was midway through the first half we changed our shape back to a four, just to try and provide a little bit more moving forward. We needed to get a foothold in the game, we were standing off and we needed to affect their two tens which we talked about and which was a little bit about the reason we changed our shape.It wasn't working though, people weren't committing to that so we had to revert.”
Having started the season so impressively at both ends of the pitch, especially in front of our own fans, todays defeat capped off a tough week for the Blues.
“We've gone up against two very good teams at this level, they have good players in key areas of the field and we haven't dealt with it as well as we could have done. Sometimes you just have to accept the opposition were better on the day. The important thing that we must show in the future is that we're better when we come up against these sides in the future.
With no time to dwell on the defeat, Mark previewed yet another tough test as we welcome Hartlepool to Brunton Park on Wednesday evening.
“We'll see how we shape up. We're likely to lose Harvey, it seems that he was really under the weather at half time so we had to take him off. We'll see how he is, hopefully we don't get any more falling by the wayside as a consequence of the illness that is going through the camp at the moment. We'll see how everybody is on Monday and we'll go again. It'll be another test, we'll have to regroup and understand where we need to do better. We need to make sure that in terms of engaging people and affecting them in duels won't be the ones inwhich we've been poor in the last couple of games. It’s so we can get closer to people and we can affect the opposition better than we're doing at the moment. That will be a little bit of the emphasis that we'll talk about.”
Back-to-back fixtures in front of the Brunton Park faithful proves to be another opportunity to set things right.
“I think we've got to be careful, we've got to just remind ourselves it's the first time we've been beaten at home for a long time. It was going to happen at some point so it's happened in a week and people will get a little bit emotional about it. We need to recognise where we are and what we're trying to do. We'll pick ourselves up and we'll go again.”
On a more positive note, Mark was pleased to welcome Morgan Feeney and Josh Williams back to the starting eleven.
“They've both been training for weeks now so they were ready for a game. Morgan did okay, Josh was unlucky really as we brought him back because I feel his best position is as a wing-back but as a consequence of obviously not committing in other areas of the field and being able to affect them then that affected his standing in the game.”
