Manager Graham Alexander provided his reaction to iFollow Iron after the 2-0 home defeat to Oldham Athletic.
Patrick McEleney’s and Eoin Doyle’s strikes proved to be the difference between the two teams, though Scunthorpe had chances while the game was at 0-0 which the boss thought his side should have taken.
ON THE GAME…
GA: A 2-0 result is a negative for us, and we’re not going to hide away from that fact. The game-changing moments have gone against us and gone for Oldham. We had two one-on-ones and hit the crossbar at 0-0, and these are the moments where you have to take advantage and then go on and win the game. We haven’t taken them and their first goal deflected off the back of an Oldham player and went into the top corner. There’s not much you can do about that - it’s not like an open opportunity from five yards out. It’s a long distance strike that fell to him and took a massive deflection. That made it difficult and we poured bodies forward, and they then caught us on the counter-attack (for the second). We’ve come back from behind lots of times over the past two years because we try and commit bodies forward to get back into it. A lot of times it has worked for us, as everybody knows, but sometimes you take a bloody nose like we did today. I can’t think of Matt Gilks having any saves to make today, again. We’re disciplined and though we’re not creating hundreds of chances, we are creating enough and good ones that should win games. We want to make sure we take control of our own destiny and see what we can do better. We can certainly do better with the chances, so we have to work on the improvements we can make and make sure the breakthrough happens.
ON BOUNCING BACK AT WIGAN…
GA: We can’t do anything about the past, so what we have to do is approach the next game in the right manner and make sure we take the positives. We need to turn that screw in the final third. I wouldn’t say it was a champagne performance today by any stretch, but we had the better opportunities at 0-0 and if we’d have taken those I think we’d have seen the game out. Because we didn’t, due to the deflected goal, it put us in a difficult situation and obviously we were both committing for the second goal. In the time I’ve been in football, every season has a challenging time and difficult moments, and we have to work through them. We did it last season. It was a worse run than this for defeats and points last season, but we finished the season strongly and finished third in the table. I don’t see why we can’t finish strongly again.
ON MURRAY WALLACE AND LUKE WILLIAMS’ INJURIES…
GA: With Murray, it’s either the back of his knee or his hamstring. I’m not too sure at the minute because I haven’t seen (Head of Medical Services) Michael McBride, but that’s the area of the leg he was holding. That’s disappointing so we’ll have to see how he is in the week. Unfortunately, Luke Williams came off at the end and might have injured his hamstring again. It’s devastating for him and for us because we really took our time with him to get him up to speed. It doesn’t look good and he looked very upset when he came off the pitch so we’ll see how he is.
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