Crows’ boss proud despite Leiston defeat

PAUL ATTFIELD hopes his team can replicate the level of desire shown in the two FA Vase matches in future league games.

Despite going out of the competition in Tuesday night’s replay at Leiston, the Crows boss was proud of the effort shown by his players against what is a strong step five side and says his team now need to maintain that level of performance week in, week out.

“The effort they put in I hadn’t seen so far this season,” said Attfield after the match.

“They’ve put a lot in to these two games and they need to take that into the league season.

“We’ll have to find out in the next couple of games, though. It’s hear-say just talking about it. The defeat might have knocked them a bit but they’ve got to take it to Saturday’s game.

“I’ve always said if they put the effort in they are capable of beating any team in our league but it’s our effort and concentration levels that have withered too many times this season and it’s cost us too many points.

“If they believe in one another and learn from this performance they will pick up more points than they will lose.”

Royston will count themselves unfortunate not to have won the tie after dominating both matches against Leiston but Attfield says his team have been punished for not starting either game on the front foot.

Attfield added: “I don’t think it was a lot dissimilar to Saturday really. We started the game slowly and conceded a poor goal and they had a couple of chances but other than that we’ve controlled the game.

“I couldn’t ask any more from the players. I think it shows when you play against a good team that you’ve got to play for 90 minutes because if you’re not on your game for two or three minutes they can hurt you.

“Leiston are a top side and I thought we made them look quite ordinary at stages of both games. We passed the ball particularly well and we had a couple of very good chances. You’re not going to get many chances against a team like Leiston and you’ve got to take one but ultimately we’ll look back on the first 10 minutes of both games and that’s what cost us.”

Attfield was unable to name a strong bench for the match owing to a number of absences and niggling injuries which became more of a factor towards the end of the match when the players unsurprisingly tired. And he feels his team needed to score while they were on top if they were to get themselves back in the game but it wasn’t to be.

“We were always going to get tired in the last 10 minutes and I think that showed,” he said.

“We needed to use that first 25 minutes of the second half and we couldn’t do that and the game got stretched when we gambled by throwing players forward.

“I think we started to find the pitch conditions quite difficult and we missed our chance in the first 25 minutes of the second half where we were completely on top and dominant and we needed to score in that period but unfortunately we couldn’t do that.”