Jack Currie fronted up and made no excuses for Boxing Day’s disappointing derby defeat and drew upon our powers of recovery.
“We’ve proved when we’ve had a loss this season that we comeback from it strong and I think that’s the key message for Friday,” said the young Dons defender after we were beaten at home by Sutton United.
“Most importantly we need to show up on Friday against Colchester and we know how to do that. We reset, train over the next couple of days and make sure that we’re on it, having assessed where it went wrong.”
You can listen to everything Jack had to say below.
Jack’s season got going in September and he’s been a part of six of the nine clean sheets we’ve kept in League Two so far this season - and he didn’t hide his frustration after we lost 1-0 on this occasion.
“In all fairness there were moments where we did what we were supposed to, but I think on the whole we just didn’t turn up,“ said Jack.
“We didn’t give the fans what they wanted on Boxing Day and that was down to us. We’d prepared and it was all very structured - we knew what we had to do, and we didn’t do it.
“It was below the standards we’ve set. Recently we’ve been keeping the ball, moving it well, but today we completely went away from that and that’s on us as players. We get clear instructions from the gaffer and the managerial team and if we don’t stick by them – we get undone.
“We were losing duels, we were losing battles, we weren’t picking up seconds and that was on us. We weren’t ready quick enough for the throw in that led to the goal and he shouldn’t have had an easy finish.”
Jack, who picked up three of our Player of the Year awards at the end of last season, also tried to help restore parity at the other end of the pitch.
“You try to get up and down the pitch, but first and foremost as a defender you want to keep a clean sheet,” said Jack. “As defenders, we didn’t do well enough to do that.
“Going forward, I didn’t think we were a threat really. We didn’t create chances; we didn’t do what we normally do – we didn’t feed Ali down the line or our wingers. We know the pace that we have in our team and the quality and If we’re not playing the football to get it up to them – again, we become undone.”
Photos: Nigel Keene (Pro Sports Images).