Hinckley AFC manager Carl Abbott gave a frank assessment of his side’s showing against St Andrews last night: “awful”.
Abbott was furious with his side’s performance 4-1 Polymac Packaging League Cup semi-final second leg defeat at St John’s Park as St Andrews progressed to play Alvechurch in the final at the Bescot Stadium.
With AFC chasing a one goal deficit from the first leg, they hit the post twice in the game but didn’t create many other chances aside from Paul Sullivan’s second half goal.
And Abbott was annoyed by his side’s second half performance in particular. He said: “It was a really poor performance. We’ve not showed up.
“I didn’t think we were too bad in the first half, the early goal made us chase when really we wanted to control proceedings a little bit more.
“But I think we shaded the first half, they had more chances but we had the territory, even though we didn’t carve out as many clear cut chances as I’d have liked us to. We should have scored through Jav.
“At half time we spoke about settling down in the game and taking our time. It was a two goal task to take it to extra time, we didn’t want to worry about the three goal swing to win it, we preferred to take the smaller task.
“But we’ve just one out and proceeded to lose the plot. The gameplan went out of the window and we went far too long ball with no real idea of how we were going to create things.
“We’re not a side that’s equipped to go long ball. We don’t play that way and we don’t really know how to go about playing off second balls. It was awful.
“I’m as angry tonight as I have been at any time as a manager here. We’ve let ourselves and our supporters down badly tonight.”
In truth, there was a lack of energy about the AFC players for much of the second half in particular but Abbott said that wasn’t down to a lack of desire, it was simply that his side weren’t good enough.
“There’s desire, I can assure you of that, but collectively we just seemed to be on the pitch wherever the ball wasn’t.
“We never looked like we were close to the ball, pressing things or winning things. That makes it look like we’re not grafting or that there’s no passion and desire. There is, but it was just a really bad showing.
“I can’t apologise enough. We’ve really, really thrown one in tonight and I’m so disappointed.”
And while the former Wolves Casuals boss felt his side were the better of the two in the first leg, he admitted that the Premier Division side fully deserved to reach the final.
“St Andrews were far better than us tonight. We’ve been beaten by a far better side. I thought we were the better side in the first leg but we just couldn’t defend as we’ve had a lot of playing issues defensively. We were filling gaps so we couldn’t really defend them but we were far superior in the game.
“Tonight St Andrews came here and they out-battled us, they outplayed us and they deserve to win the game. I’ve got no qualms about that at all.”
