Abysmal, poor, awful – just some of the words used by Ian Allinson to describe St Albans City’s defensive performance in the 3-2 home loss against Chippenham Town.
City had twice come from behind, David Moyo getting both, and looked to be on course for a point but Nick McCootie’s strike four minutes from time handed the win to the Wiltshire visitors.
And the boss’s frustrations were mostly due to the fact they had spent a full training session on Thursday practicing the very situations that they utterly failed to deal with in the Vanarama National League South clash.
“Defensively we were awful and we got what we deserved,” said Allinson.
“We didn’t defend properly, we made too many mistakes and within 30 seconds we were 1-0 down.
“And we got lucky that it was only three in the end.
“We defended very poorly and that’s a shame because we changed our shape to defend a little bit better and harder to break down but that was beyond belief for me.
“The most disappointing thing is we’ve probably wasted an hour and three-quarters on Thursday practicing defensive situations that arose against Chippenham and nobody has taken that on board.
“That’s sad.”
Saints have already made changes to their squad this season and after shipping 15 goals in the opening seven games, it looked as if things were improving, barring the odd exception.
But Allinson says they will keep changing things if the current crop of players are unable to follow the instructions handed to them.
He said: “If people aren’t going to take that on board we’ll have to keep bring in people who will and that’s not an idle threat.
“We can’t keep wasting our time. It’s let us down, it’s let me down and it’s let Glen down.
“I know how hard he’s worked to put training sessions on where we know what we’re doing, where we defend set-pieces, that we defend our goal properly and today we’ve been abysmal.
“The crazy situation is that I know there’s a very good team in there and on their day they are a match for anyone in this league.
“But every single one of them has to approach the game properly and be on it. We can’t afford to have one or two of them off their game.
“The whole squad of 16 and especially the 11 that started have to be ready to go and win a game of football, they have to defend in numbers and defend for their lives.
“Against Welling we’ve got a clean sheet and that was probably the toughest game we’ve had this year.
“But Chippenham exposed us in areas that other teams haven’t done for a long period.
“We’ve had some words in there and the buck stops with me at the end of the day but that wasn’t good enough.
“It’s bitterly disappointing as I felt we’d got over this but we have to improve going to Torquay.”
That game down in Devon is tomorrow night (Tuesday) and Allinson will wait and see just how much toll the long trip takes on his players before deciding whether to risk injured duo Percy Kiangebeni and Ralston Gabriel.
One player definitely missing will be Zane Banton who is on an agreed two-week leave of absence to visit his grandfather in Jamaica.
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