Manager Mick Mulhern acknowledged that failure to deal effectively with set pieces proved costly for Whitley as they went down to a 3-1 defeat at Ryhope CW on Saturday. “I was pleased with the first 30 minutes. I thought we were decent, we were on the front foot and kept the ball quite well. Obviously Kieran took his chance well for the goal. Maybe the thing that was catching us out was that final ball as we ventured forward towards their defensive third. Of course the disappointing thing was that we conceded three goals all from set pieces, which obviously will have to be stopped.”
Five regular squad members were missing through injury and unavailability which Mulhern admitted “restricted things a bit.” He continued “Obviously I know the players well having been here all season but I do want to shake things up a little bit. I want to give an opportunity to everyone who’s here but I’d like to bring in one or two and I’m working on that behind the scenes.
“I was disappointed with the result but I wasn’t massively disappointed with how we went about it. When you take away the set plays, they haven’t really opened us up and caused that much of a problem but on the flip side of that we were pretty similar, we haven’t really dominated the game at all. Their defence have dealt with things before we got into an area where we can hurt them. We’ll have to change that, we’ll have to be a little bit braver in our penalty box when we’re dealing with set pieces and take responsibility. For the corners we didn’t, and the free kick, it’s bounced in front of Tom. He put his hands up for that one, though it wasn’t really his fault. It was a good free kick that bounced just in front of him making it very difficult to deal with it.
“I’m not going to make excuses but at the same time I’m not going to criticise the lads because they were trying to do the right things but it just broke down in key areas and at key times.”
With two strikers missing he admitted “I didn’t have a second option in attack; beyond those we had on the pitch you’re talking about square pegs in round holes. Players can go and do a job but you’re not talking about natural centre forwards and that’s the way we had to finish the game, but everyone who’s gone out there has done a job and I was pleased with the lads who’ve gone on. Carrsy (Kevin Carr) went on and made a positive impact.”
