Pep Clotet was left to pick up the positives as a sluggish start left United with just too much to do against Blackburn Rovers last night.
3-0 down after 21 minutes, United rallied but eventually fell to a 4-2 defeat and the United Manager was left to rue that opening period when he spoke to iFollow.
“It was a tough night for us” he admitted. “As we knew, Blackburn are a very good team and you have to be at the top of your game. You have to be ready to compete and then it’s about who competes strongest. Blackburn are physically strong, they work hard for each other and they have a lot of very good players who have played at Championship level, which they showed tonight. But obviously we were affected by a very bad start where we gave them the opportunity to start on the front foot, and after 20 minutes the game was very hard.
“In spite of that you have to give credit to the players because after those 20 minutes, losing 3-0 at home a lot of teams would crumble but ours got together and showed a really good spirit and managed to get back into it, score to make it 3-1 at half time and then in the second half we started strongly and showed our level as well.
“That’s massive credit to the players to show how much they believe in themselves and in the football that they want to provide. We showed that we can play the game and can be aggressive and it’s about bouncing back at Southend on Saturday now.”
See the whole interview plus Highlights in iFollow