Head coach Chris Agutter admitted he was left searching for answers after his side’s heavy 5–0 defeat to Morecambe F.C..
A devastating 20-minute spell in the first half proved decisive, with an eight-minute hat-trick from Jack Nolan seeing Morecambe race into a commanding lead after Paul Lewis had opened the scoring, and left the hosts with an uphill battle that led to Daniel Ogwuru adding gloss to the scoreline in the second half.
“I struggle to sum it up, to be honest,” he said.
“I really struggle to. It was 20–25 minutes that was very similar to the spell we had against Solihull and also Walton & Hersham earlier in the season.”
“It’s one of those periods in a game where everything the opposition hit seems to end up in the back of the net.”
“To concede the goals the way we did – direct from a corner, direct from a free kick, a deflection, a misplaced pass – suddenly the game is done. It all happened so quickly and from that point it becomes incredibly difficult to recover.”
Despite the severity of the scoreline, Agutter insisted embarrassment was not the overriding emotion after the match.
“I’m not embarrassed at all,” he explained.
“This is football at a very good level and you’re playing against good players. We said before the game that Morecambe are a good side. If you read too much into the league table you can take yourself down the wrong path.”
“They’ve got real quality, real experience and they were ruthless in that period of the game. When you add in direct goals from set-pieces, deflections and everything else that happened in that 20–25 minutes, it becomes very difficult.”
The Head Coach believes the focus now must be on understanding why similar spells have occurred a handful of times this season, stressing the importance of perspective given the progress the squad has made in recent months.
“The challenge for us is to understand why we’ve experienced three or four of those periods in games and to try and iron it out,” he said.
“It’s a young group and their lack of experience can show in moments like that, similar to the Solihull game earlier in the season. But we’ll learn from it, we’ll analyse it properly and we’ll bounce back.”
“I’m not going to hammer a group of players that I think are very good and who have done incredibly well.”
“They’ve taken this club from the foot of the table to where we are now with ten games to go. That’s not by accident and it’s not because they’re not a good group.”
With the damage largely done before the interval, Agutter admitted the focus at half time had to shift away from chasing the result.
Instead, the message to the players was about managing the remainder of the match and protecting the progress made in recent weeks.
“3-0 isn’t an irretrievable situation – I’ve been there before,” he said.
“Last season we [Worthing] were 3-0 down at half-time and won the game 4–3, so you always have that belief in the players and in what they’re capable of. But once it becomes 4-0 the reality is the game is out of reach.”
“For us it became more about not undoing the great work we’ve done lately in terms of climbing the table.”
“We’ve also built an advantage in terms of goal difference compared with some of the teams around us, so it was about trying to protect that as well.”
“The idea was to counterpunch if we could – can we get one, can we get two and maybe make it interesting – but the reality is the result was gone by that point.”
“So it was more about preserving the good work we’ve done leading into the game rather than retrieving something that, at that stage, was out of reach.”
