Dave Edwards reflects on Town’s defeat at the weekend after a frustrating afternoon at Adams Park.
A solid performance from Dave and Town, however Town struggled to find the back of the net. “It was one of those days where we should have been one or two nil up in the first half but we weren’t clinical enough when taking our chances and then one lapse of concentration in the second half where we didn’t win the first ball and didn’t win the second ball. I think it was the only time in the game where we didn’t win one of the balls and it cost us.”
Town were solid and throughout the first 45 minutes they were the team on top. With their dominance, phases of play and possession, Town should have found themselves a goal or two ahead. “We knew we were going to come here for a battle, and we had to match the physicality of what we can bring, and I thought we did that really well. On the turnover of possession, I thought we attacked really well, with lots of movement and creating lots of space.
"We had good chances and definitely one or two we should be scoring and ultimately that’s what cost us. Going in at half-time we should have been at least one, maybe two ahead. We started the second half poorly I thought. We gave too many fouls away, too many opportunities for them to put the ball in the box and one of them fell right to Aarons and he put it in the goal.” Dave said.
Wycombe were full of confidence and were unbeaten at home. Town expected a difficult game. “They reminded me of what Shrewsbury were like in the season where they nearly got promoted a couple of years ago. When they get in front it’s hard to get back into the game, they were very clever and very savvy, ran the clock down, keeping the ball in the corner, taking their time with the free kicks. It was difficult but we didn’t really do enough in the last half hour to justify the scoreline.
"We started to move the ball a little bit better but never got in a position where we were going to hurt them. There wasn’t a reaction after the goal and that’s probably the most disappointing, we weren’t all over them trying to get that equaliser and trying to win the game. But luckily we’ve got a game on Tuesday to try and put it right.”
In added time on Saturday, Town saw defender Ro-Shaun Williams receive his second yellow card in a matter of minutes. “It was a bit of naivety from Ro. I could kind of see it coming almost, you can see the frustration building up in Ro-Shaun and Akinfenwa is clever, he’s been round the block a few times and just roped Ro-Shaun into doing something. It looked harsh but I think you can’t put your hands on someone else in that situation and he got punished. He’s going to be a big miss for us on Tuesday night.”
“You look at the results and probably we could have gathered six to nine points extra from games that we were well in and could have got goals. We’re not scoring enough. I thought we created enough first half, but we weren’t clinical enough by putting them away, it’s something we need to improve on, and we need to be more ruthless when we get the chances. We’ve got good finishers at the football club, good finishers that started the game so we should be able to convert some of them chances and we defend well every single game but we’re not going keep a clean sheet every single week so we need to start scoring goals. Scoring more goals is what we’ve started to work on a lot more in training now and hopefully it’ll come sooner rather than later.” Dave talked about not scoring enough goals in each game as Town have scored 12 goals since the beginning of the season.
Dave has returned to Town’s starting 11 after being side-lined for a few weeks after picking up a knock on his ankle. Edwards was heavily involved with the starting 11 at the beginning of the season after captaining the side as Ollie Norburn was out injured. “I’m feeling a lot better. I think when I was starting the games at the start of the season, I was still nursing my ankle a little bit and getting through games. But I can say now I’ve had three or four weeks where I’ve had no pain at all in my ankle. That allows me to train better with more intensity and then I feel better in the games. I feel disappointed that I couldn’t get more involved today but on the whole, I feel a lot better.”
Town return to Montgomery Waters Meadow Tuesday evening as they face Peterborough United. “We need to bounce back and get a positive result. We know how good they are attacking but defensively we’re very strong, hopefully we can hurt them. It’s going be an interesting game, one that we would have no trouble getting up for and we can go and get a result Tuesday night.”