Cook: Toughest Period of My Management Career in Terms of Wins Saturday, 28th Aug 2021 18:35 Town boss Paul Cook admitted he’s currently in the “toughest period of [his] management career in terms of wins in games” following the Blues’ 2-2 draw with AFC Wimbledon at Portman Road. Dons sub Jack Rudoni netted from close range five minutes into injury time, the Blues having been 2-0 up until the 58th minute when Ben Heneghan pulled a goal back, Joe Pigott having given the Blues the lead from the spot and Wes Burns having made it 2-0. Asked whether the draw felt more like a defeat, Cook said: “It just does, doesn’t it? You never try and kid supporters or people who come to a game, you understand when people get agitated that you’re not winning and then you look at the signs of the team. “Like I keep saying to the lads, what we’ve done, we’ll do again, it’s football. And what we do, we have to learn from what we’ve done, and unfortunately at the minute we’re not. “For whatever reason, and people will always point fingers of blame, I’m not like that, I don’t come out lambasting players and stuff. I think football’s educational. “I think you could feel in the stadium at 2-0, it was a lovely atmosphere, it was jovial and everyone was euphoric. Unfortunately, when Wimbledon got the goal, you could feel the tension in the stadium come and you also feel the tension in the players’ decision-making. “The best way to relieve pressure is to keep the ball and unfortunately at the minute, for a variety of reasons, we’re probably not doing as well as we should be, but we’ll keep going.” Is it a confidence thing in terms of the players’ mindset? “Guys, we’re five games in. Again, we scored two goals at home and we haven’t won. “We’ve had a lot of chances, we’ve got in a lot of great situations, but unfortunately Wimbledon are always going to put you under pressure late on and we’ve succumbed to what we’ve succumbed to. “As a manager, you come away and you look, you analyse and you come back and you try and be better. “One of the things for us is, especially with the new lads, I think everyone’s seen the quality of Hayden Coulson today, but he’s still not match fit. And these are the little things that we’ve got to get to. We’ve got to get our players up and running. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with next week’s game at Wycombe, but the reality is we’re still in pre-season mode, we still need lads back fit and we need to train very, very hard in our pursuit of getting where we want to be.” Town have conceded two goals in each of their five league games so far, which obviously makes it tough to win matches. “It’s there, it’s ‘What have you learnt?’ What have you learned from three o’clock to five? What has surprised us in the game today? The reality is as we go away, what must we prepare for to get better,” Cook continued. “If you could have written a script today to get 2-0 up in front of a fantastic home crowd, again we have to go on and dominate and win the game. “Unfortunately, I don’t know the minute we conceded but it wasn’t long after our second goal. And confidence in football is key, especially at stadiums like this and when you play for big clubs. “The reality is that our fans want to transmit positive energy and unfortunately if we don’t give them that energy to transmit, the energy will turn the opposite way and correctly so, and 100 per cent rightly so, and that’s something we’re just learning to manage at the minute.” Town have now gone through the whole of August without a win, drawing 2-2 in all their three home league games, losing 2-1 away twice and exiting the Carabao Cup at the hands of Newport County. “Just keep going,” added Cook, who has now won four games of 22 in charge of the Blues. “This is probably the toughest period of my management career in terms of wins in games. “And I look at a new team and I look at the subs we’re making, taking off both full-backs in a game. I don’t take full-backs off, my substitutions are the front four because they’re knackered and we want to score more goals. “At the minute, we can’t do that because of the fitness levels of the team and that’s due to Covid, squads, lateness [of signings], the list of the excuses is there. It’s just the reality and we need to now to get weeks in, which we’ve got, and train very, very hard.” Asked whether he can understand why fans are moaning and groaning, Cook said: “If you’d gone home a minute before, you’d have been delighted and you’d have been happy, we’d have been up and running. A minute in football’s a long time. “I understand what the supporters think, I understand the frustrations of people after five games that think the league is over and done with. But there’s no such thing in football. “We’ve got to make small strides and small steps. Our small steps are very small at the minute, but the reality is that we look like we can score goals. The unfortunate thing is we also look like we can concede them, so we know what we’ve got to work on.” Quizzed on next week’s game at Wycombe, which could be postponed with the Chairboys set to have three players called up allowing them to have the game called off, Cook said: “I don’t know, that’s Wycombe’s choice, isn’t it?” Regarding Coulson’s performance, one of the positives from the display, he said: “You know yourselves, we’re a brand new team, we’re five games in, I get it. “I get football, I’ve been managing long enough, I get what everybody wants. No one wants it more than me and the staff to see the game out, you can imagine how flat the dressing room is. “But don’t make excuses, don’t be weak. We’re not that type of people, we have to work harder and we have to get more results and we have to start getting them a little bit quicker. That’s football.” Asked whether the key period was after the second goal when Town should have kept the ball for five or 10 minutes, Cook said: “We spoke about it, you’ve hit the nail on the head, we don’t give our crowd enough time to enjoy the moment. We don’t give the opposition enough time to come on to us so we score again. “The reality is when you go 2-0 up at home, we want to go and win 3-0 and 4-0, we don’t want to sit back. “The third goal in the game was always going to be everything, credit to Wimbledon, they’ve scored it, they’re always going to put you under pressure with the balls, the corners, the set pieces and they’re also good in possession. “And the reality is we’ve succumbed. You hold your hands up and go ‘No problem with that’ and we go away and we have to work harder.” Regarding conceding twice from set pieces, he said: “He’s big, [Ben] Heneghan, they’ve also got [Ollie] Palmer, they’ve also got [Will] Nightingale, they’ve got some really big lads in there. “We had Joe Pigott playing 90 minutes who’s not [played much] and I’m not going to make excuses for our lads because you have to see games out, irrespective that you have to be a streetwise team who can do one thing at one end and also be good at the other. And at the minute it’s quite clear that we’re not good at both ends.” Town were without Macauley Bonne, who Cook says picked up an injury in training earlier in the week. “He tweaked his hamstring on Tuesday in training and he was very, very much touch and go,” he said. “It was a similar one to Conor Chaplin at the start of the season and we haven’t seen Conor for four weeks. “So we made the decision not to play Macauley because of that fact. Macauley will be back very, very quick, he’s had a scan, it’s nothing, it’s a very, very small issue, so he’ll be back right away. And obviously that was a big blow.” Wes Burns limped off in the second half with an injury Cook says he has been suffering with for a number of weeks. “Wes has been carrying a knock, Wes doesn’t train for large parts of the week and unfortunately it’s an achilles problem that he’s carrying and it’s an ongoing problem,” he said. “And as you can see, it’s not helping us because we’re making substitutions again. It’s not an excuse by me because I know fans will go ‘What’s he done taking him off?’ We’re taking people off because they can’t last the game, and that’s not tactical, that’s just purely physical aspect that we’ve got to rectify.” Wimbledon manager Mark Robinson was delighted with the point but frustrated that his team didn't get going until they were two goals down. “We’ve just chatted in there and at 2-0 down you have seen what we are capable of,” Robinson told his club’s official website. “The shackles came off and we started to play and it had nothing to do with the changes. We’ve got to have that belief from the start of the game. “We let the players talk and [influential defender] Darius [Charles, who returned to the club this summer] was in there. “The fans were incredible again and you show your appreciation, but we’ve got to realise why we found ourselves in that position of being 2-0 down. It was a mad five minutes and through some poor detail we left ourselves with a mountain to climb. “I could see that the fans were excited, but we just want to excite them more. We are a work in progress — we know that — but we are only going to get better. “Some of it is down to our youthfulness, but we’ve got to stamp our authority on games from the word go. “After we went 2-0 down there was only one team in it, but every single one of our players has got to have that belief from the start. “Some of the detail isn’t good enough, so we’ve had a great chat in there and that’s what we’ve got to improve upon. “Ipswich have obviously got some really good players, but a lot of their attacks came from our basic errors, and they are the things we have to work on. That detail has cost us in a lot of games this season.”
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