It was a well below par Athletic team which lost 2-0 at home to Brentford on Saturday. Gone was the confident squad that had given the supporters such confidence after a good run of results and it was more of an inept team that were always second best to the visitors who played the last portion of the game with ten men after centre-back Miguel Llera was sent off. Even so, manager Paul Dickov still thought that his side could have claimed all three points. It is a worrying trend and Athletic have now only won just one of the last 15 matches played at home. Dickov said, “It is hard to play against 10 men, but we should have made better decisions when we had the ball. Against 11 men we want to get the ball to our wide players and stretch teams and up until the final 10 minutes we didn’t do that enough. But we also had more than enough chances to win the game. That is the disappointing thing. We say to the boys that when you are not playing well, give yourselves a chance and keep yourselves in the game. The goals they scored were sloppy from us. If you are not playing well you try to grind out a result and we were creating chances. We know they are a good team, one of the favourites to go up and rightly so. But the disappointing thing for me is, I feel we could have won the game. We were as good as them. They did the horrible little things in the game better than we did.”
“I don’t know if it is that we have won two games and the boys think they are better than they are. Maybe I am to blame for that as I am constantly telling them how good they can be. I don’t see why they should struggle at home or away. We want to play the same way, win games and pass the ball and score goals. I don’t go with the idea that teams can’t play at home or teams can’t play away. From start to finish, we dropped the standards that we set at Walsall and Orient. You always hear me bang on about consistency. And I have to get to the bottom of why we can go away from home and get two really good, solid, professional performances and then put in a performance like this.”Source: FOOTYMAD
