Carver: This is a recurring pattern

Sunday’s #LGDLEG match ended in a 2–1 defeat for the home side. After the game, head coach John Carver answered journalists’ questions.

Coach’s comments after the match:

Sometimes, when you get hit hard right at the end, it’s very difficult to say anything. Emotionally, this is tough – I’m very angry right now. Honestly, I could copy and paste the way we conceded goals in previous matches and compare it to how we’re conceding now. It’s a recurring pattern. We don’t block crosses, we defend poorly in the penalty area, and we fail to win second balls. It’s not like we don’t see it or analyze it, because we work on it all week in training.

I’m disappointed, especially after that second half. But what does my disappointment matter if we keep making the same mistakes and concede 62 goals? Then you’re in trouble. We’ve reached a situation where not everything depends on us anymore, but we have to do everything possible to prepare for the next match and wait to see what happens with the other teams. So we’re not buried yet, but we’ll have to keep an eye on the other teams.

To be honest, it was an even match. What was the difference? Legia had two chances and scored from one of them after a cross. We also had our chances, especially two from set pieces, but we weren’t able to turn them to our advantage.

The only thing we need to do now is focus on ourselves and on Saturday’s match against Bruk-Bet. The players won’t get an easy time even on their day off, and we have to do everything we can before Saturday to win in Nieciecza.

On Anton Tsarenko, who came on in the 61st minute:

Anton got his chance mainly because he’s been performing very well in training. I wanted to see this earlier, in previous matches. I’m glad it happened. I don’t judge players only by matches, but also by what they show during the training week.

On injured players returning to fitness:

There’s no chance that Viunnyj, Jaunzems, or Kurminowski will play in Nieciecza. As for Ćirković, we wanted to get him back on his feet. He trained on Thursday, but afterward he felt even worse than before the session. Since Thursday, Aleks has been in bed, and we need to see exactly how he feels – certainly better than I do right now. We hope he’ll return to training on Tuesday, because it’s difficult to just get out of bed and immediately train at a very high level.