ADKINS WANTS CITY RESPONSE
BOSS SAYS PLAYERS MUST LEARN FROM READING DEFEAT
NIGEL Adkins admits Hull City have fallen well short of expectations over the last week following the Tigers’ loss to Reading.
A 3-0 defeat at the Royals saw a week that started with a much-needed win over Ipswich Town end with successive defeats, following on from Tuesday’s loss to Wigan Athletic.
It has dropped City to within a point of the relegation zone with two wins from nine Championship games as they continue to struggle to build any sort of momentum.
With a daunting schedule on the immediate horizon, in which City take on three of the current top four, the head coach was left ruing a missed opportunity to get much-needed points on the board at Reading, where the home side hadn’t won since April.
“We started really poorly,” Adkins told the Mail. “It gave them the impetus and for the first half an hour they were winning all the first balls and second balls. Across the pitch we were a couple of yards away from their players.
“For me, I was looking for nine points out of this week and we’ve only come away with three.
“We’ve got tough games coming up, there’s no hiding away from it, Middlesbrough, Leeds and Sheffield United are tough and from my point of view we look at the week we’ve just had, I wanted to get nine points going into those three. Every match is challenging anyway which has been demonstrated again at Reading.”
City fell behind early as Leandro Bacuna’s corner found its way to Sam Baldock in the six-yard box and the striker needed no second invitation to finish after four minutes.
The Tigers should have levelled through Jackson Irvine just before half-time and after the interval they were made to pay for their impotence, as Jon Dadi Bodvarsson and Andy Yiadom killed the game off and inflicted an ugly defeat.
The manner of the loss is unlikely to sit well with City players and fans alike, but Adkins is keen to ensure the players are aware of where it went wrong at the Madejski before drawing a line under it.
“We’ll be back in Monday,” he added. “That’s why we have the strategy of analysing the game and the lessons we learn from it because you have to then find a way to move on and get ready for the next game in preparation.
“I’ve used this way of doing it for several seasons now, it hurts and you’ve got that hurt to be a winner which is not nice but it’s how quickly you learn the lessons and then get ready for the next one.
You have to pick yourself up and go again.
You can’t forget about it, you need to learn from it.”