Glyn Hodges gives honest assessment as AFC Wimbledon can’t defeat Bolton Wanderers
BY DANIEL MARSH
Glyn Hodges made no excuses for his AFC Wimbledon side, as he admitted they “weren’t as good” as they should have been in their stalemate with Bolton Wanderers.
The Dons missed the chance to record back-to-back victories for just the second time this season after being left frustrated by a third consecutive goalless draw at the Cherry Red Records Stadium.
“It’s disappointing not to win back to back [games] because it’s massive if you can do that down the bottom,” said the Dons manager.
“We know that anybody can beat anybody. I think people looked at it as an easy touch today, but we were wary of how Bolton are. They defended well and we weren’t as good as we should have been.
“I like the expectation because we’re a good young team and when we perform like that last week, there’s a full house here today, the expectation is probably for us to win 3-0. Unfortunately, this league doesn’t quite work like that. We’d like that as well, but no disrespect to Bolton and their manager, they know what they’re doing. It’s been well documented they’ve had a really hard season, but they’ve got some good players.
“Today was one of those games where things weren’t dropping or happening for us. We didn’t get the ricochets, we lost a lot of knockdowns and you go through those games. We created chances on the set-pieces at least, but we couldn’t get one over the line.
“We’ve got one defeat in six games, so while you want to get those three points over the line, we’re still quietly ticking along, it’s in our hands. All we can do is look at ourselves and what we can do, and we didn’t do enough today to probably win it.
Kwesi Appiah looked to have found the elusive breakthrough on the hour mark, but his headed goal was disallowed after a tight offside call.
“It’s really tight that decision. Obviously, it wasn’t given but you’d probably keep your fingers crossed it is given. But overall, we didn’t have too much threat up there. We didn’t create enough clear-cut chances to worry their goalkeeper too much which is disappointing.”
Wimbledon’s cushion above the relegation zone was cut to six points after Tranmere’s triumph at Accrington, with the Dons facing crunch clashes against Tranmere and fellow strugglers Rochdale later this month. But Hodges was keen to downplay any added importance to those two fixtures out of the nine remaining games.
“There’s nine games left, there’s enough points out there,” explained Hodges.
“We won’t get carried away with those games [against Tranmere and Rochdale], they’re big games obviously but every game is a big game.
“What I want us to do is to perform better than that [today]. I think we were great last week; we showed a maturity and a resilience. Today we looked a bit naïve and a bit edgy and we weren’t at our best. We’ve got to learn from it.”
PICTURES BY KEITH GILLARD