Warne ‘First Goal Rocked The Lads’

Rotherham United Manager Paul Warne said the first goal ‘rocked the lads’ today after the three-nil home defeat to Wycombe Wanderers.

He told Radio Sheffield that he thought the first goal was ‘avoidable’ but it set the tone for the rest of the game.

‘It rocked the lads,’ the Gaffer said, ‘but I thought, in the first half, we had plenty of opportunities to get back into the game.’

There is no denying we had opportunities but, again, we didn’t take them.

‘We tweaked the team at half-time but, in hindsight, that didn’t work,’ Warney said. ‘There was no tempo or pace to the game which we thrive off and the goals gave their lads a massive boost.

‘Wycombe are a very good team and I knew it would be a difficult game because they have taken a lot of points of a lot of good teams.

‘Our lads wanted to win the game desperately but the goal rattled them and we never really fully recovered. In the second half none of our set-pieces were very creative and it just ended in a dire performance for us.

‘It’s a disappointing loss for us and it does hurt because our performance in the second half was disappointing and when you need your strong characters to step up we didn’t have enough of them today.. We have ten more games to try and put it right but it is, obviously, difficult.’

I didn’t think we played too badly in the first half but our second half was really poor. we let Wycombe boss us all over the pitch and you can’t let a team do that to you, especially at home, although, to be fair, ‘at home’, I don’t believe, means that much in the present climate with no fans there. With fans in the ground do I think we would have go the players back from being two down? Yes, I think we would have. But, that wasn’t and isn’t to be for the rest of the season. After our away game at Huddersfield next Saturday we have three live TV games coming up, all at home, and we really, really must do better than we did for those final forty-five minutes today.

Keep the faith.

Up The Millers.