Wally Downes expressed his disappointment with Wimbledon’s performance against Fleetwood tonight.
Our manager felt it was a missed opportunity to put valuable points on the board against a Fleetwood side that The Dons got the better of in the Emirates FA Cup recently.
“We didn’t deserve anything from the game. It was a match that I fully expected us to be able to go for the three points in. It was the first game for a while that we could look at and think, ‘this is an even sort of game’. They were mid-table and we’ve done well against teams near the top recently so tonight there was an expectation from me that we should have been looking to get three points from it.
“Since I took over as manager they’ve given me everything and tonight was the first time that we were comprehensively beaten. When you think that we’ve played against top teams in the division and competed well, tonight there was a frailty about us that I didn’t like. It may have been the expectation of having to go out and win a game. That may have been too much for the boys. It may have been in their heads after the defeat on Saturday, but we had been positive all week. There were no surprises with the way Fleetwood played. We had beaten them twice before this season and it was disappointing that we performed like that tonight.
During his post-match interview for iFollow, Wally added that he encouraged the players to talk about what went wrong afterwards.
“The easy thing is to go in ranting and raving, but we’ve got some injuries and the people that can turn it around are the players in the dressing room. I encouraged them to speak their minds in there and they did that. They know that they have under-performed. They know that they had a bit of spirit and momentum going, but it was bereft out there this evening. It wasn’t there. For whatever reason, we have to get that back and get it back quickly.
“The game is gone. We will review it, as we always do, and then it will be gone. Then it will be preparing for the next game.”
The interview with Wally is available to watch by clicking on the link to our iFollow channel above.