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Gary Simpson interview

Posted on: Sat 21 Aug 2010

The Silkmen were beaten 3-0 at Accrington and we spoke to Gary Simpson after the match.

A bad result today. What went wrong?

"We just couldn't get to grips with them for too much of the game. For the first 10 or 15 or so we had looked OK, we'd created a couple of openings, a few flick-ons and had looked dangerous. But after that they started to pass it about a bit more and we just sat off them.

"We let them have too much space and we didn't get tight enough to them.

"For whatever reason they looked like they had more energy than us and kept the ball better.

"After the first goal, which we should have done better with, we were packing the box with big lads and although we won the header for the second, they reacted faster.

"And then the third took a huge deflection, which is how it goes sometimes when you're not playing well.

"So far this season I'll happily defend our performances against Stevenage and Leicester, and I think we played very well for most of the game against Shrewsbury but there's nothing I can defend today.

"Too many players had a bad game and to be honest, it's been a long long time since I saw a performance like today was at times. We're a fit team but looked like we were running on empty at times."

You changed the formation a bit for the match.

"Yes. We'd looked at Accrington and got reports on their matches so far and we thought we had more height, strength and pace than them. But we just couldn't get the ball in the right positions to use those and they had us chasing them at times.

"In hindsight I think we might have done things differently but we had done a lot of work on Thursday and Friday on pulling the defence about and on set-pieces but we couldn't get the ball up there to take advantage.

"They created four or five good chances and came away with three goals and we sometimes looked like we were waiting for something to happen rather than making it happen ourselves.

"There's a lot of our players who will look at themselves tonight and know that they had a very poor game today. Too many of them had an off day and it was too many at once.

"You can't know why people will put in a bad performance like that, but there were too many today and it caused us all sorts of problems."

So what's next?

"There's no point me jumping down their throats really. They know that they have had a bad game today and they have come in for some criticism from the terrace. And to be honest you can totally understand that from the fans.

"So really I need to lift them rather than get on their backs. We need to understand why things happened how they did today and work on it in training. The absolute minimum is to give 100% in every game and that didn't happen."

It's clear that the fans were unhappy, do you have a message for them?

"They were very unhappy and they let us know. But I can fully appreciate why they weren't pleased. They have spent money coming up to see the game and the absolute last thing they wanted to see was that performance.

"I can fully understand their frustration and can only apologise for the performance today. There were a lot of disappointed people in the dressing room after the match and we all know that today simply wasn't good enough."