By Brian Bennett
Ashington interim manager Marc Ellison pulled no punches following his sides’ 5-2 defeat by Newton Aycliffe on Friday night.
Ellison described the reverse as being a ‘defensive horror show’ and said the players have not got to feel sorry for themselves whilst asking them for ‘better character and desire.’
“It was a bit of a Friday the 13th defensive horror show if I’m being honest,” he commented, “We take three massive steps forward then 50 even bigger steps backwards it seems. From our levels and performances against Emley, Garforth and Consett, we seem to have gone backwards a touch. Don’t get me wrong we’ve still played some half decent football in both games (Grimsby and Aycliffe) but the top and bottom of it is half decent football at times doesn’t win football games. Tonight we’ve conceded from restarts twice in a row, TWICE!!! One of them when we’ve just scored to get ourselves back in the game, then they kick off and go and score. Then from our restart we give them the ball straight back and let them come down and score again – it’s criminal.”
He continued: “Yes I recognise we weren’t playing with a natural number nine and that obviously helps putting the ball into the net but this past week in training we worked on different crossing zones and putting the ball into good areas. In fairness we’ve created a few opportunities from wide areas tonight but either the final ball wasn’t right or we haven’t wanted to go and break our necks to get on the end of something and score a goal. And that just comes down to desire really and wanting to go score a goal, and that comes with defending our goal. We need better character and desire in both boxes.”
Ahead of two home games this week, Ashington have dropped to fifth from bottom of the table and Ellison added: “We’ve had in my opinion a great opportunity to get ourselves away from a chasing pack over this last week and we’ve ended up giving ourselves another little mountain to climb. No disrespect to Aycliffe but I think they’d lost their last six games. We needed to be mature enough and have enough arrogance about us to be able to exploit that, however at times you’d of thought it was the home side who were on a four game unbeaten run.”
He went on: “So as you can probably tell, I’m really, really disappointed but the games are coming thick and fast and it’s not time for feeling sorry for ourselves or throwing toys out of prams. We’ve got some tough games coming up over the next few weeks and we need to start picking up points again. Hopefully the new additions will give us a little lift and we can put this past week behind us quickly.”