Abbo on Cup Run
Hinckley AFC manager Carl Abbott spoke of his mixture of pride and disappointment after his side were knocked out of the Emirates FA Cup with a 5-2 defeat at Chasetown.
Three goals in a fifteen minutes spell early in the second half was the backbone to Chasetown’s victory, and though the former Wolves Casuals boss can look back on some memorable days as part of the cup run, he felt that his side didn’t do themselves justice at The Scholars Ground yesterday.
He said: ‘It has (been an historic cup run). When the pill’s gone down that I’ve swallowed today, I’ll reflect on some good results: that fantastic day at Bromsgrove, the heroic performance across two legs against Walsall Wood and a really, really unbelievable display against Redditch, who were a higher ranked side than we played today.
‘Today, we’ll lick our wounds a little bit because we’re far, far better than that scoreline and we perhaps didn’t do ourselves justice today.
‘Silly mistakes, sloppy goals, poor goals off set pieces have produced a scoreline which doesn’t really tell the story of how competitive we are really, matching ourselves against sides from that level. It’s disappointing.’
Hinckley started the game in a narrower system, mirroring the one they used in the previous round against Redditch United. Abbo explained why.
‘The game plan was the same (as the Redditch game) for different reasons. We were trying to exploit different areas of the pitch. I’d done my homework on them (Chasetown) and I did expect them to be 3-4-1-2 actually; three at the back and it was with that in mind.
‘But you can only prepare so much and they’ve gone 4-4-2. We still felt that we could exploit things and just keep it tight really.
‘We wanted to keep it at 0-0, the first goal was awful off our throw-in. Liam (Smith) has put his hand up, he knows he’s made a mistake there. We’ve just let them counter us with men over and it was a really poor goal to give up.
‘We’ve had one cleared off the line and a great chance from Luca (Luke Richards) one on one, so take that goal out of it and the first half was a little bit narrow and non-football. That was what we knew and if we’d have gone in at 0-0 we’d have been delighted and then opened the game up.
‘Second half, we’ve switched the system and gone with the wingers, as we had to because we needed to get back in the game. Then before long we’ve ended up going three at the back because we fell 3-1 behind.
‘At 1-1 when we got the goal back, I could only see us going in and winning the game. It was a shame that they got their noses back in front so quickly and taken the wind out of our sails.’