Lennon – Derby Performance Not Good Enough

Manager Neil Lennon has admitted our performance against Derby County at the weekend just wasn’t good enough.

Speaking to the Official Site following the four one defeat, the gaffer knows the quickfire goals around the half time break cost us and gave us too much to do in the second period.

‘We were poor. For the first 40 minutes we did okay. We then went behind to a wonder free kick from Tom Ince and after that we didn’t react well enough. We’ve committed suicide with the second and third goals and when you do that against a quality side like Derby they will punish you.’

Lennon goes on to say that our plight certainly wasn’t helped by losing Trotter and Wheater to injuries at half time and having to make the enforced changes at the interval and unfortunately he felt that we looked ‘lightweight’ in the second period.

‘Even at two nil you think we have a chance, but the third goal is the killer and overall I’m not happy with our level of performance at all. People will say there is a knock on from the game against Liverpool midweek, but we should have learned from the first time we played them and then went and got well beaten at Rotherham.’

The gaffer does admit that there were some positives from the game, such as Twardzik scoring on his debut and Bannan ‘did okay’ since coming into the club on loan, but that’s about the lot.

‘On the whole we weren’t good enough, we can’t keep making excuses. We had a lot of younger lads out there today, so we maybe need to look at getting some more of the experienced lads back in the squad.’

On that score Lennon adds that Danns comes back into contention for Tuesday evening and hopefully over the ‘coming weeks’ we’ll get Davies and Heskey back in contention as well.