Wally Downes pulled no punches with his assessment of Wimbledon’s performance against Burton Albion today.
The Dons suffered a 2-0 home defeat at the Cherry Red Records Stadium and the manager felt it was a display that lacked commitment and desire.
Speaking in his post-match interview for iFollow, Wally said: “We’ve got to put performances in that motivate the fans. The players have got to give the fans something to shout about. They turn up and they want to win, they want to be entertained. They at least want a team that is battling and fighting and today they didn’t do that. All I can do is make them aware of their responsibilities at a club like this – you need to fight. The club was born out of a fight. I don’t like harping back to it, but all my years I was at the club it was a fight. Of course, there were odd performances like that in all those years, but that’s two in the last three home games and it was unacceptable. They have got to dig themselves out of this hole and today we didn’t do any digging.
“To perform like that in front of the fans who have travelled all around the country following us is just not good enough, that’s four league defeats on the trot. Previously, they were on a run of eight. We need to address this problem straight away. We need to get gutsier and nastier. We need to be harder to beat and have more physical presence on the pitch.
“We never turned up. I can accept us not playing well, but we didn’t fight and we didn’t battle. We didn’t show any commitment to the position that we are in. I’ve said recently that the boys know how to dig in and they had been unfortunate not to get results, but when there was an expectation to win a game in front of the home fans there was no real commitment from the team. We lost our battles in the first 5-10 minutes and I was on red alert then. We weren’t getting our foot in, we weren’t solid, and we weren’t demanding things from one another. We were certainly not harassing the team that we were playing and we lost tackles early on that were critical. The opposition were thinking, ‘this is okay, this is not bad’, and I can’t accept that.”
The full interview with Wally is available to watch by clicking on the link to our iFollow channel above.