Roy Hodgson
What did you make of the display?
My thoughts are, we weren’t good enough to win it. I thought our first-half performance was much worse than I was expecting it to be. Analysing the last two games, and seeing the players in training, we had high hopes. But certainly, in the first half, we certainly did a lot to dash those hopes ourselves. I thought the second half we did start more brightly, I thought we did show a bit more confidence to play the sort of football I’ve been expecting to see the team play. And then because we conceded that goal just before half time, we felt the need to pile some attackers on the field to try to get a goal back, which almost worked for us with Dennis’ shot against the crossbar. But it also led to some counter-attacking opportunities for Brighton, which they were able to take and put the game beyond our reach without about ten minutes to go. So, we dreamt of a better performance, we dreamt of a better result. You get the result that you get at the end of the day.
How good is it to have Imsaila Sarr back?
He’s a player that we are hoping, going forward, will give us something a bit extra. It was a big ask for him today, having come back from Africa, and the celebrations from Senegal winning the cup. Sort of asked more from him that he was able to give us today. But going forward I have big expectations for him and we as a team have expectations of what we want to see from him.
Did you feel the game lacked control today like they have done in the past two games?
To an extent. I don’t think it went from being organised and controlled to have no organisation and no control. You know we’re playing against a team that are notoriously difficult to play against and they do make you run around a lot and are quite good at finding gaps. But I don’t think they fund that many [gaps], in actual fact for their two goals you could argue that they created a relatively small amount of chances. The worst thing was, that I thought, that we were unable ourselves to put them under enough pressure, except for a couple of brief periods in the game when people did seem to show their talent and make life a bit more difficult for opponents. A lot of the things in our game today weren’t very good, I didn’t think. And as a result, we got there type of result we didn’t want. We’re going to have to be good at everything we do in the next 15 games if we’re gonna pull ourselves away from the relegation zone.
It took you until the 88th minute to really force a save from Brighton’s goalkeeper, were you too conservative?
I don’t know how you can really talk about [that]. I mean, the shot that smashed off the crossbar didn’t produce a save from the goalkeeper but was very close to going in the goal, one. And secondly, I don’t know if anything, I would expect you to criticise us for being to Gungho and putting four out and out attackers on the field and playing with only two central midfielders. I would have thought that’s more of a valid criticism than saying we were too conservative.
Was the poor display due to Watford or because Brighton were simply too good?
We know Brighton are going to play well. That’s why they’re so high up in the league. They have some really good players and they’re playing with enormous confidence because they’re winning matches. So we expected that and we would have needed to play better than we did in order to counteract it in a better manner. But in the second half, I thought, with a couple of changes at half time, the players did go about that side of the job much better. And in actual fact, not only did we keep Brighton at bay, we actually looked like we might create some goal chances ourselves. A really good chance came when Dennis hit the crossbar but that didn’t go in. And of course, with four forwards on the field and only two central midfielders, we were in danger of conceding from a counter-attack and that’s basically what happened.
Why wasn’t the team that started the second half – with Imran Louza and Sarr – picked from the very start of the match?
Unbelievably simplistic question I might add. [It’s] very difficult really, you’re asking me to start changing all the thoughts I have has a football coach and start things adjourned. First thing is with Sarr is he only came back on Friday lunchtime from a long trip and was feeling very tired and I think he did remarkably well to make himself available to be in on the bench. I would have thought that’s pretty obvious to everyone. As far as the midfield is concerned, the change we made as it turned out in the first half, the player I took off didn’t have a good game and the one I put on had a better game. Once again all you’re doing is watching a game and [saying] the player who had a bad game shouldn’t have played and the guy who’s on the bench would have been the better one, especially if he didn’t kick a ball. So I’m afraid I’m not really in the mood for that type of discussion.
But would fans have been disappointed to not see Sarr and Louza from the start?
I hope they have a bit more understanding. I’ve got quite a lot of faith in fans. I would have thought not many fans would have expected Sarr to start the game when he got off the plane on Friday morning very very tired and has not done one training session with the team. As we go on to Louza and Kayembe, which was the choice I had, I don’t know how well they know the players and if I put it to them, ‘Which one do you prefer?’ I don’t know how they would vote.
How do you strike the balance between attack and defence?
We can’t do much more than put the attackers on the field. The bottom line is that when they’re on the field and they are very good players – as everyone seems to think they are – unfortunately, when they get the ball at their feet they’ve got to do something with it. You know, we can’t unfortunately, magic up ways in which they can score goals and create goal chances just by giving them the magic word in their ear. The bottom line is, Maupay didn’t have many chances in the game but the one he had he took. We need to hope our front players – everyone tells me are very dangerous, very good players, got enormous threat – they’ve got to do that for the team for the club because unfortunately there’s no amount of coaching we can do that’s gonna change anything in that respect.
