United manager Graham Alexander said his side didn’t find the required quality, as they lost 1-0 at Walsall on Saturday.
The defeat was Scunthorpe’s first in eight league matches, and came courtesy of a deflected first-half goal by Kieron Morris.
Matt Gilks saved an Erhun Oztumer penalty early in the second period and the Iron rallied late on but couldn’t find the leveller.
After the game, Alexander reflected with iFollow Iron.
ON THE GAME…
GA: I don’t think we got going until the second-half and by then we were a goal down, to the deflected shot. That gave them a boost confidence-wise. We snatched at things and didn’t have the composure/quality needed to score. It was a bitty game, there wasn’t much quality from either side but they got the break with the winning goal. We still had plenty of time to be back in the game and create our own opportunities but we didn’t manage to do that enough. If we’d have scored it’d have been from a set-piece or the odd bit of quality, but there wasn’t enough there to win the game. Over the course of it, a draw would have been the fair result but they got the break. You earn your luck though, and they defended very well, while their front two were very good on the day and caused us lots of problems. I didn’t think we showed enough in the second-half, but were better than in the first. The first-half wasn’t good enough for various reasons and we had to address that. We did as a team and the players played better, with more composure and more quality.
ON THE PERFORMANCE…
GA: There are bits to improve. We’re still a good team, we’re still in a great position, we’ve still won a lot of games and we’re still very competitive. We know in the past week we’ve been below our standards as a squad, because the whole squad has played in the last three games, and we’ve not hit the heights which we reached in the previous matches. We have to address that.
"We snatched at things and didn’t have the composure/quality needed to score. It was a bitty game, there wasn’t much quality from either side but they got the break with the winning goal."
ON CLAYTON LEWIS’ LATE CHANCE…
GA: It was a great strike from Clayton. They hit a similar one early in the first-half and it went in. All three substitutes worked extremely hard to get something, but there wasn’t enough quality in our overall play to open them up and I’m going to analyse why. There’s a responsibility on the movement of the forwards and a responsibility on the quality of the pass to the forwards.
ON MATT GILKS’ PENALTY SAVE…
GA: It wasn’t a penalty (in my view), but it was brilliant from Matt Gilks to make a great save. That gave us a boost and we then brought the subs on to look to win the game in the final half-hour.
ON WHEN FUNSO OJO WILL RETURN…
GA: I’m not sure until we get him back on the grass, but we want him back involved in the squad. He’s done fantastically well for us this year, but he’s picked up this niggle and we want to make sure he’s 100 per cent before we reintroduce him. We have enough good players within the squad to accommodate missing any individual , but obviously we want our senior/best players available if we can so we’ll see how he is next week.
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