With the festive season well and truly upon us, it’s the traditional Boxing Day fixture up next for the Blues, with Bradford City the visitors.
Part of the preparations for that encounter will be a review of the Tuesday night game, and the lessons to be learned from what was done right, and on what can be improved.
“The funny thing is that we when we went into half time on Tuesday I was really pleased,” manager Paul Simpson said.
“I was really pleased with how we were going about it. I didn’t ask us to waste the time like we were, I don’t know where that came from, but we tried to manage it.
“I said at half time, we’ve sort of lit the fire of the fans by doing it when there’s no need to, so let’s just speed our game up, and we got ourselves in front.
“I thought we were doing ok, I really did. I thought we were in a good position. I was thinking about changes just to get fresh legs on. I was pleased on the whole with it.
“Even after the mad spell when we conceded two goals, I was still fairly pleased with some of the stuff we did. Unfortunately you just get done when you make simple mistakes.”
Almost forgotten was the fact that it was a first goal of the season for Jack Armer, who slotted home a beauty on the volley.
“It was a good goal, I’m pleased for him,” he confirmed. “We actually did a lot of good things against a really good side.
“I thought we dealt with what threats they had, and we knew what threats they would have. But we just had that little spell where we lost our way, and it costs you. That’s the overriding thought I take away.
“We’re going to have to look at it and work on it all again. Their first goal, when we practiced set plays in training, they were absolutely outstanding in dealing with it.
“We had good deliveries going in from the lads who weren’t starting, we had players attacking the ball, but we were winning the first contact, dealing with anything that dropped down for seconds. Sadly for that goal we didn’t manage it.”
“What we need to remind ourselves is that you have possession you have to be calm,” he added. “You just have to keep the ball.
“We had a throw-in down in the bottom corner, and put it back out for a throw-in for them, we then don’t deal with things, we’re throwing ourselves into challenges and missing the ball, Hunts has a pass back to the goalkeeper that he miskicks, it’s probably one of the first mistakes he’s made in his time he’s been here.
“It’s all of those things. But I just think we didn’t pass the ball well enough. We’re going backwards and square instead of playing forward. My whole mantra for the whole of this season is play forward, run forward.
“We got a little bit too negative. I don’t know whether you get into a situation where you go safe instead of going front foot and being really positive.
“We’ve just cost ourselves and that’s the big thing that’s disappointing. We can complain about poor decisions and all that sort of stuff, we’ve cost ourselves unfortunately.”
But heading towards the halfway marker we also have to remind ourselves that we’re still in a pretty good position.
“It’s certainly a better place than we were in February when I came in, so there’s lots of positives to take,” he agreed. “But I’ve said it all along, we don’t get judged after 20 or 21, we have to make sure we keep driving forward.
“That’s what the plan is in terms of trying to strengthen the group, and shuffle things around, and hopefully over the next couple of weeks we will do that.
“We’re not going to have anything in place for 1 January, because we can’t, but we then have 14 days before the next game, where I’d like to think there’ll be a little bit of movement and we can start to bring players in to add to the good stuff that we’ve already got.
“They’ve got to be good because they’ve got to dislodge the lads who are in the side. Tuesday’s result is a little blip for us, or we have to make sure it’s a little blip and make sure we react positively in the home game on Boxing Day.”