So Joey, a satisfactory night for you?
Yeah, lots of positives. Obviously, the negative of Whelo getting dismissed, which I think we’ll appeal. We’ve got a different camera angle and if you’re going to send anybody off, surely it’s the scrum half for them who made a diving tackle?
If you pull somebody back by the collar of their shirt, I think it’s dangerous, if you make contact with the neck area of the player. We’re seeing now with the concussion protocols and head injuries, it’s very dangerous.
Just because they haven’t got studs on the end of it, for some reason referees deem it nowhere near as dangerous as when you make contact with your feet or your legs. The boy (Killian) Phillips makes contact with only with the neck, shoulders and head of Sylvester Jasper in the first period and the referee doesn’t give anything.
The boy (Kofi Balmer) has the opportunity to horse collar Trev as we’re breaking away. Disappointing because we’ve lost a man in the melee.
I thought they were what the problem is in the modern game, an academy side that are miles away from producing people who can play in the league. They’re so far away, let’s be honest, so it kind of makes a mockery for me of what that Premier League 2 is.
You hear me talk all the time about these big clubs stockpiling players and what player for them today… We wouldn’t take any of their players, we just wouldn’t, their so far away. It’s a good opportunity for us to look at that because we do like to utilise the loan market but I was so surprised to see them.
It’s easy for them because their games don’t matter. Their games are irrelevant and nobody cares about them, but we’ve got a proper game on Saturday when mortgages are on the line, real football, real men’s football.
So to have a team of kids go out and leave late challenges on you is bizarre. The competition is about developing younger players.
We don’t really want to play in this competition, I’ll level with you. It’s a waste of our time because we get players suspended, you get players injured from nonsense tackles from young kids who are miles off playing men’s footy.
I just don’t see why we should support it. Next game, I may well just play our kids because I can’t risk my first-team players getting injured against a bunch of kids who are miles off the level and trying to impress people are watching by kicking senior players. It’s a nonsense competition.
To be fair, when you get to play Swindon you have a chance to make further progress so you have to balance that.
Yeah, but who cares about it? It’s a nonsense competition, and when it’s officiated in that fashion it makes me even further devalue the competition.
I’ve tried to support it in all my time but when I get officials like that who are basically on work experience sending my players off that don’t deserve to be sent off and all the while allowing young players to steam in and make stupid tackles and don’t book them or reprimand them because they’re young players, it’s a nonsense.
In terms of ticking the boxes you wanted to tick tonight, you had some minutes for the players who have been out of the team with injury and you won the game. Which of those boxes is more important to you?
We don’t take it seriously, so I said to the lads tonight go out and enjoy it because the opposition are inferior because they are a bunch of kids. If you take their teamsheet and look at it in five years’ time, some of those lads will be working in civilian jobs. They won’t be playing football.
Youth teams are usually geared around the development of one or two players, so I get why the EFL have put the competition in, but you can see from my point of view, if I lose any real senior players, we’ve got a proper game at the weekend and real football to come.
You try to do the right thing because if we don’t fulfil the quotas, we get fined and all the other nonsense that comes down the track, but you can see from our standpoint we’ve got a duty of care to fulfil our league campaign and play the best team we can on a Saturday in the league.
Having this nonsense of a competition in the middle of it, when players can be injured and suspended now, it just makes me question it.
Who is the competition for? Is it for Crystal Palace? Yeah, I think so. Is it for the referees and officials to gain experience? Yeah. It isn’t for senior players and senior teams, it’s just a deterrent to us.
The sooner we’re out of it the better and I’m going to go forward carrying absolute disdain for the competition when referees officiate it like that.
I can appreciate the emotion. Can we go back to Lewis Gibson, Josh Coburn and James Gibbons? How did you think they did when they came on?
Yeah, I thought they were fine. We got the minutes into them that we wanted, but I could have done that on the training ground today in an 11 vs 11 on a Tuesday. I don’t need to play against a glorified youth team.
It’s a lot safer to do that on our training ground and I can get 40-60 minutes into the lads with no issue of them getting injured or suspended by a youth team.
In terms of preparation for Cambridge, have you come out injury free?
We’ve had Alfie Kilgour kicked in the head for a penalty in the first half and the referee plays on and then tells our players it’s probably a penalty. That’s no good to us. Alf’s got to go through a concussion protocol from getting kicked in the head in the first half.
We’ve got to assess Sylvester Jasper because he’s got a smack in the head and John Marquis the same.
It’s frustrating and I guarantee you, if we raised the level of physicality, we’d have had more sending-offs there tonight, and you can imagine me, I’m trying to keen a rein on our lads at half time because they’re wanting to get stuck into them and meet fire with fire. We can’t afford any suspensions and any ill-discipline, everything is on a bed of discipline, and then my most experienced player has run in to protect one of his teammates who has not only been horse-collared but then trampled over by the lad.
There was a very naughty challenge on Sylvester Jasper and I’m going to get the clip and send it to Mike Jones because the ref can’t miss what he’s missed because he’s a yard away and the boy makes absolute contact with the point of his elbow on the neck and head of our play. If that’s not endangering a player, I don’t know what is.
Joey, Harry Anderson has not played in the past couple of games. Is he alright?
We sent him away for a bit of rest and recuperation. He had a really severely bruised foot.
He’d played the past couple of games before his spell out with injections in there. It wasn’t getting better, it was getting worse once the pain medication wore off, so we felt it was time to give him a little bit of time off his feet.
He got away and had a few days in the sun with his missus last week, so he’s now back in the building and on the road to recovery. We’ve just got to wait for that bruising to settle down so we can get Harry back fully fit.
I thought Jerry Lawrence might get a game tonight. Is there anything to worry about there?
Jerry was never scheduled to play. He’s in the kind of Josh Grant recovery from injury stage, so he’s still a number of weeks off with a groin issue.
I think it’s a huge spike going from academy into the first team and his body is just adapting to that and he’s had a little bit of an issue with his groin and we’ve had to back off him.
He is back on the grass training. He and James Connolly trained today and yesterday, but he’s a little bit short and he probably needs another week or 10 days training. Maybe the Swindon game, all being well, he comes back into contention for that.
When Elliot Anderson first arrived, you spoke about his first impression in training. Josh Coburn trained with you on Monday. What was his first session like?
He was good, yeah. Really good. Bright and bubbly and even by his small cameo today you can see the physicality he’s got for a young player and once we settle him in to what we’re about, he won a lot of first contacts tonight.
Again, it’s against Palace’s 21s, but you can already see he’s placing his head to flick them on. He’s got real awareness about what he’s trying to do, he’s not just aimlessly flicking it on.
I think he gives us another really nice addition on the frontline. Azza is doing superbly, Lofty’s in the goals, John was in the goals at the weekend, and I think Josh comes and gives us that fourth striker, with Harvey Saunders fifth striker. It gives us really nice options on the front side of the team.
Is that the way you’re going to go, really striker-heavy, because you played three at the weekend and the two times you’ve done that are probably two of the best performances you’ve had?
Yeah, maybe less in terms of control. It’s horses for courses and for us it’s about dealing with the opponent in front of us. On Saturday against Exeter, I told you they get a seven-man squeeze going down the pitch and they are really aggressive in their positioning, leaving themselves structurally very vulnerable.
They were really open, so we knew if were to play – and I think we are a better footballing team than them, we would normally want to play – we felt it would give them an emphasis, certainly at home, and when we’ve been there in the past we’ve been guilty of playing into their pressing strength.
It was lessons learned from our encounters with them over previous years and we adjusted for the opponent. I felt we nullified the threat of them and the opportunity for us was to play with a bit more of a physical presence on the front side.
The downside of that was you had Luke McCormick and Antony Evans playing right and left midfield, albeit when we got pushed back in, they ended up playing right and left-back and that’s not what we want.
I’m constantly trying to beat the opponent. Every match is a chess match for us and you want to find your best team. We got in that groove last year and you’re like ‘B******* to the opposition, it doesn’t matter what they do, that’s our best team and that’s what we’re playing’. As of yet in League One, we’re yet to establish that kind of dominance and you’ll just keep tweaking and twisting until you find that right formula.
I think you are right to point out that in the Morecambe game and Saturday’s game, a little bit of a quicker exit strategy from our half into their half certainly makes us look a bit more forward-thinking through the team. It’s a different way than we’ve done in the past, but for me it doesn’t matter, it’s about winning games of football and being effective. If we have to go from front to back relatively quickly to do that, then so be it.
Finally, Trevor Clarke always bring the effort, but I thought there was a lot of quality about what he did tonight. He linked well with Sylvester Jasper in the first half and then he scores a very good goal in the second half. You must be very pleased with his response, and also if he can channel that performance into a league game, then he’s going to be pushing for more chances in the team, isn’t he?
Yeah, and I think he’s responded superbly. Zain Westbrooke has as well in a different way; obviously, he didn’t have the same impact as Trev tonight. I thought Trev was excellent in the game.
The challenge is always thrown down and you’ll remember Luke Thomas last year. For me, I just want good players who want to get after it every single day. I’m not staying away from my missus and kids to waste my time and if people want to p*** about, this is not the place to be. It’s just not my nature.
On the whole, our lads are superb with that. They understand the demand that’s placed on them and I’m very straightforward in terms of if you’re not doing it, you just won’t be in this building and hanging around.
That’s on and off the pitch and that’s staff. We’ve got to be ruthless and relentless in pursuit of excellence because I think to move a club like this out of the position it was in, it’s not a charity and you can’t keep people around. You’ve got to be really aggressive with your recruitment of players but also with cleaning the building out of people who’ve maybe got a tad comfortable.
I was very vocal and I’m always very candid in terms of where people’s positions are at the club, but it’s always subject to change and if you want to turn over a new leaf and get right after it then no problem.
Trev had a very good first half and had a really good partnership building with Syl on that flank. Second half, he caps it off with a really good finish with his right foot, which is something I’ve not seen before. I think it will do his confidence the world of good, as it will for Alfie Kilgour getting that goal.
Disappointed he’s had to go off because he was feeling dizzy at half time. Hopefully, he’s OK for Saturday’s game but we just couldn’t risk him.
Winning games breeds confidence and a clean sheet tonight will be really good for Anssi as well. Really pleased. The only black mark is Whelo got a sending-off because apart from that it was a really professional performance and we got everybody the right amount of minutes and it gets us looking forward to playing here on Saturday against Cambridge and going into it with a win in our stadium.
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