Buckley Rues Mistakes

By: Rob Sedgwick
Date: 26/08/2008

ALAN Buckley was once again left rueing individual errors after the 1-0 defeat by Chesterfield on Saturday. Town gave the ball away in one of their corner routines and Chesterfield broke down the other end, resulting in the winning foal for Jamie Ward. "The game hinged on us making a very haphazard mistake," admitted the Town boss.

Buckley did not think Chesterfield were not the best side Town will come up against this season, although with Grimsby having created virtually no scoring chances they only have themselves to blame for not getting anything out of the game.

"I thought they made their intentions obvious from the word go. They were very direct. Their lad (Jamie) Ward was a threat all afternoon - very pacey and full of running against us. But our four dealt with their three quite well. They had a couple of half-chances but, by and large, we did pretty well against them," said Buckley.

"I felt after about 20 minutes we came into the game and, other than them scoring, they didn't threaten our goal at all.

Describing the games only goal Buckley said: "We had a corner. The ball came out to Heggy (Nick Hegarty). He didn't put it back in, he turned the other way - but his decisions all day had been good apart from that. He chose to ignore Tom Newey and played a ball blind inside. It was a mistake. So, from a corner of ours, there was then a diagonal ball forward and the ball's in our net. That's really disappointing, especially as we had nullified their early threat.

Buckley highlighted his side's lack of chances as a key problem area. "I don't think we had a shot worthy of the name all afternoon. Even from two free-kicks in decent areas, we hit the wall and didn't make them do anything apart from stand there. I think for all our huffing and puffing, we weren't good enough to break them down. The part that perturbed me most was our lack of goal threat."

Grim Rob Says: It seems a bit harsh to play players out of position and then crticise their mistakes. If Town don't have two available full backs they should play a system which doesn't use full backs, such as last season's 3-5-2 formation, rather than start the game with two players who don't normally play there in the two full back berths.

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