Not Good Enough For Cotterill

Manager Steve Cotterill has confirmed the Bristol City performance in last night’s defeat to Derby County simply wasn’t good enough.

Making the trip to the iPro Stadium to return with a four nil loss, a disappointed gaffer told the Official Website in his post game interviews, that the performance just wasn’t acceptable because we knew how tough a side Derby would be given their form and goalscoring exploits so far this season.

Saying they weren’t good enough and had no belief in themselves, Cotterill believes we were effectively beaten before the first whistle as we had somehow psyched ourselves out of the game and a new look 443 formation certainly didn’t play out as he had hoped during the planning stage.

‘It`s a difficult night for my players. They`re not good enough to deal with that. We didn`t play with any belief to think we could win the game in the first half. In the second half we played for 20 minutes, but then they score against the run of play and it`s game over. We couldn`t beat them, no matter what we did. The change of formation just showed up other inadequacies in the team.’

Cotterill went on to say that we effectively tried to ‘keep them at arm’s length’ and it just didn’t work.

‘We tried to keep them at arm`s length a little bit and we needed to know whether we could do something else; whether we had an alternative system away from home. It didn`t work as we would`ve wanted it to, because I don`t think we were enough of an attacking force in the first half. We wanted our wide men to press a lot higher, which we did for 20 minutes in the second half. But we didn`t play with enough courage in the first half.’

Queens Park Rangers next and they’ll no doubt be bouyed by their comeback fight against Brighton in their comparative match last night.