By Gavin Perry

Tuesday evening saw a flurry of goals in the opening minutes as Ashington went two down within three minutes before pulling one back in the fourth minute. A goal a piece in the second half led to a 3-2 defeat at The Northern Metal Recycling Stadium (Darlington Road).

Here’s what Marc had to say after the final whistle

“You look at the first two minutes, concede two goals and you’re thinking the game is already over. It doesn’t matter what level of football you’re playing at, to gift the goals we’ve gifted tonight is alarming, especially so early in the game.

Minute later you get one back but after that we still never really got going. We weren’t close enough, we looked leggy and we didn’t look anything like the team we were last week.

To be fair to them, they were the much better team in the first half.

We changed shape at half-time and, for the majority of the second half, I thought we looked a lot better. Matty has had to make one or two important saves, but for that 25 or 30-minute period in the middle of the half, we dominated the game and probably should have scored before we eventually got ourselves level.

Then, for whatever reason, we stopped doing the things that were getting us success.

And once again, we get hit with a late goal and come away with nothing.

So yeah, really disappointing.

It was almost the Heaton Stannington situation again, where we’ve managed to get ourselves back into the game and you think, take what you can and get out of there with something.

I don’t actually know what’s happened with the final goal yet. I’ll have to watch it back, but once again, issues in both boxes have cost us.

In a sense, I have to give the lads some credit for the reaction to a terrible start. They stayed in the game during the first half when things weren’t going our way, and then they took the game to them in the second. But we probably relied on two or three players to have really good games, while the rest were below the level or standards they’ve set themselves over the past few weeks. 

We can’t be a bit-part team. We need to be at it from minute one to minute 90, and unfortunately we’re falling short of that too often – we’ve conceded way to many goals early on or from restarts of the second half and in the denying minutes of the games.

It’s alright looking pretty and playing good stuff in the middle of the pitch, and I’ll probably sound like I’m repeating myself from last week, but both boxes are where it really matters.

We’ve missed some really good chances again tonight as have They as well by the way – so the scoreline could have been very different either way if some of those opportunities had gone in.

But the bottom line is you cannot give teams a two-goal start that early and that easily and expect to win football matches.

At the same time, based on the majority of the second half, did we deserve to get something from the game? Probably.  That’s the frustrating part because there was enough in that second-half performance to suggest we could have come away with something, but we’ve gave ourselves a mountain to climb in first 5 minutes.

It’s still really early in the season, but the gap is slowly increasing with teams around us picking up points, so it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise we need to start turning performances into positive results.”