Hugo bemoans continued bad luck

Hugo Langton bemoaned his side's continued bad luck after watching his side concede 2 scrappy goals, whilst spurning several chances of their own, in Saturday's 3-0 home defeat to Hendon.

"How unlucky were we?" he asked. "Its unbelievable how much bad luck has gone against us this season. Don’t get me wrong, on that showing Hendon are probably the best footballing side we’ve played but we matched them for large periods. Their first goal was to be applauded, and hats off to them for the way it was constructed, but we were still in the game despite the goal and had some great chances without converting any of them. Then 2 errors in 2 minutes killed the game and that pretty well sums us up at the moment. Michael Hunter feels he’s let everyone down with the two goals but when you’re a ‘keeper any sort of mistake is going to get highlighted more than normal. I’m not going to criticise him, though, because he’s saved us so many times this season and the third goal (a clearance that rebounded in to the net off the face of striker Elliott Charles) was just one of those things.

But we have to put our chances away because we’re going to continue to struggle unless we can give ourselves something to defend. We knew Hendon were going to be a very good side but, at 1-0, we were very much still in the game and I think that the match was much closer than the scoreline suggests between two teams trying to play good football. I always try to take positives out of every game and I was pleased that we kept going for the 90 minutes. I also thought that Tommy Murphy had his best game since joining us. He gave their full-backs a difficult game and we were unlucky not to profit from some of his work. Jake Jacobs, I thought, did a fantastic job when he came on. Their number 6 (Kevin Maclaren) was bossing the midfield so we changed it around, took Kery off and went 4-3-3, and asked Jake to do a job on the guy which he did so brilliantly that our stats showed he (Maclaren) successfully passed the ball only once after that. We obviously need to do some work together as a unit because, with the firepower we’ve got, we need to find out why we’re not putting the ball in to the net. (Hendon boss) Gary McCann told me it has taken him 3 years to get his team to where he wants to be so we have to bide our time, be patient, and keep working very hard before we’re going to see the results. As Dolly Parton said, if you want a rainbow, you got to put up with the rain! “

Meanwhile, Hugo confirmed that goalkeeper Ken Westoby is hoping to undergo an MRi scan early this week to determine the extent of the damage to his knee following last week’s match at Southwick.