Clucas ‘No-one Has Given Up’

Rotherham United midfielder Sam Clucas said it was ‘tough’ after yesterday’s two-nil home loss to Southampton.

‘I think we gave them (Southampton) too much respect in the first half,’ the thirty-three year old told Radio Sheffield, ‘but we’re in the game in the second half but we’d left ourselves an uphill task by then.

‘It’s another game that’s gone when we’ve not picked up points. There’s a lot of games to go but we can’t keep saying after game that we were unlucky, we were better in the second half. We need to be picking up three points and it doesn’t matter if we play badly. I’d rather play badly and pick up three points to get out of the situation we are in.

‘You know you are coming up against a real tough team, they were twenty-two unbeaten before today, but we’ve been good at home and wanted to put pressure on them but when you go a goal down after three minutes you’re on the back foot straight away and you can’t really plan for that. (Ed Note – I see that but the other way to look at it is you’re one down on three minutes but there’s eighty-seven plus minutes to get back into it).

‘When you play against teams like these you are going to give up a lot of possession. The game plan was to go and frustrate them a little bit and keep a good shape, which we did in the second half, pounce on back-passes and get as high up the pitch as we can.

‘Every player wants to get on the ball and play but it’s difficult at the moment when we are conceding a lot of possession.

‘Trust me, there’s no-one in there that’s given up. We are all fighting and we want to do better – we have to do better. Now we have got to look forward. We’ve got another big game next week but we’ve got a full week when we can plan on going to Leeds.

‘We’ve got to believe in ourselves and start picking up points, it doesn’t matter how it comes.’