Mark Cooper’s Glovers fell to 3-1 defeat at the hands of Worthing at Huish Park and the Yeovil boss said he wouldn’t blame the referee for the defeat.
Speaking to BBC Somerset’s Ian Randall, Cooper said: “If you’ve never been a winner or you’ve never got over the line you feel some nerves and we’ve only got a couple in there that I think have actually won something and it’s not easy to win. The big danger today, which I spoke about and everybody wants to hype it up and win, is the performance. And I spoke to the players about it Thursday, Friday, today not looking at ‘what if’, we need to perform and we didn’t. We played the occasion, I thought and not the actual game.”
Cooper confirmed he’d been to see the referee, Gareth Thomas, after the match and the scenes which followed the final whistle. When asked about the conversation, Cooper said: “I was calm. [There was] just a couple of decisions I wasn’t quite sure about. The first one, the penalty, obviously we have the benefit of seeing it back and it’s not a penalty and the offside Murphy’s clearly onside. Decisions of such importance, you’ve got to be really sure to give them, but I’m not gonna blame the ref for our defeat.”
📸 Gary Brown
Sam Pearson missed a glorious opportunity in the 3rd minute and although Cooper admitted his side defended poorly, he felt Yeovil should have been in control.
“We had some brilliant chances in the first, I think it was a minute, two minutes, where the ball’s, I don’t how far it was out, six yards? And you can have a touch and roll it in the in the bottom corner. Put it over the bar and we had numerous chances to really get control of the game and when we set up like we did to be aggressive and we took the ball off them and we had them chances they need to go in because the way they play, they always get a chance to play through you.
“You do well to create that many chances in the game and not win it. But we conceded some poor goals, though we didn’t defend well today. But again, the defenders have been brilliant. We should be winning that game with the chances we have.”
Yeovil conceded a poor second just before half time, but Cooper felt was a foul on Jordan Young in the build up. “Well, it’s a blatant foul on Jordan Young to start with on the halfway line, and then Jay just makes a bad error with a back pass. I was shouting at boys ‘just get into halftime’ and no issue. We had we had six or seven off colour today, we didn’t defend well, we were slipping. But their argument will be, ‘well, hang on a minute when are the forwards gonna get us out of trouble by taking their chances?’
“We had some bits and pieces where a little bit more quality would have done that [levelled the game] and then we scored a great goal, but which is onside and for some reason they disallowed it. I’ve just asked that question, but that the linesman was adamant it was offside.”
On to Truro…in Gloucester..