Bromley Head Coach, Andy Woodman has criticised the “unacceptable” “soft underbelly” of his squad after a 5-0 home defeat to Leyton Orient.
Braces for Jaze Kabia and Yusuf Akhamrich plus a 91st-minute finish from Armando Dobra saw Orient end Bromley’s 27-match unbeaten league run at home, which left Woodman’s Ravens sat 18th in the League One table.
Woodman post-match slammed his team in an interview on BFC TV for producing a weak display with little second-half fight and refused to blame the loss on the fact that he has revamped his squad which is still gelling together.
“Pretty poor for this to be honest. We’ve got a whole new team pretty much. It’s no excuse, you know, one-nil at half time, I thought in the first half we were getting lucky in going one-nil down.
“Erm with the second half, you know? The balls off the pitch, the the linesmen wouldn’t give it. We just didn’t after that, we felt we crumbled like a pack of cards. Yeah at that point, I’ve been here five-and-a-half years, six years. I have never had a team that’s got a soft underbelly and I’ll see it at the moment and I’ll accept it.
“Actually none of my when I accept this team with a soft underbelly, and the way you can see the second half, the way you accept not.”
The 55-year-old however was most annoyed at having conceded in the first minute of the second half for a second consecutive match – having also done so in a 7-2 loss away to Sheffield Wednesday at Hillsborough on Saturday – and questioned the spirit of some players.
“Two games on the trot now we’ve conceded straight after half time. You know regardless of anything, you know? It just you can’t get a foothold in the game. You know, we had a foothold in the game first half. Come out second half and you concede straight away and forget whether it was off or on, and it was off by the way and the linesman wouldn’t give it.
“You’ve still got to defend. You still want to defend your box. And when you see a guy just slide through the end of the corner and around him, you’ve got to question certain people in certain situations, in certain desires.
“And I’ve never questioned that since I’ve been here and I’ve never had a moment questioning that and I won’t accept how they defended out there. I don’t care what league we in.”
Woodman proceeded to iterate that the performance is the whole team’s fault including himself after he noticed that some adopted passive attitudes in the second half, rather than get dug into the “ugly” side of the game.
“The EQ itself, you know, you completely don’t give yourself a chance. And then when you concede like that which is a carbon copy of strapped half time on Saturday, you know, you can see why it’s too late to go down. You can see one or two people thinking ‘Oh it’s not going to be our day.'”
“You can see one or two people kind of thinking ‘Oh well it’s not my fault.’ Well yes boy it is your fault and it’s all about faults. Myself included. It’s unacceptable. That’s unacceptable. And I can put it down to a new group trying to gel them together, you know. I don’t care about any of that.
“It’s about desire, and it’s about body shape, and it’s about commitment, and it’s about doing the ugly things in a football match that you have to do, rather than keep thinking you’ve got to do the nice things.
“The ugly things are the things that we need to do in football matches, and that’s what it’s done for five-and-a-half years and at the moment, we ain’t doing it for long enough.”
Having been in charge of the club since March 2021 and led them from National League to League One, Woodman noted the lack of character and desire to represent his and the club’s vision and stated that previous experiences at other clubs count for little.
“I’ve been wanting to see some character from the word “go” you know. I think people in this football club know me well enough, and I’ve been here long enough so that I want a team that represents me. And at the moment, a team that represents me and a team that represents Bromley. And it’s probably fixed quick.
“And we can’t keep saying, “It’d be ok, because guess what it won’t?” And I do think I don’t think we’re a bad team. I just think we’ve got to learn quickly and we’ve got to realise quickly what it is to play for Bromley Football Club. It doesn’t matter where you come from, where you’ve played before, that counts for nothing now.
“You’re at Bromley Football Club and you now need to play like a Bromley player. And that is giving everything, every ounce of your body, every bit of sweating your body for 98 minutes. And if it’s 40 or 98 minutes, you’ve got to keep running and you’ve got to keep giving everything.
“And that’s why it’s stepped and I think you’re there.”
With two consecutive league defeats for the first time since March 2025, Woodman felt that his team simply came up against two quality teams, as he spoke of Orient’s third-tier experience that commanded respect irrespective of their own “newbie” status.
“It sadly was up against a top-top team in my opinion and we weren’t at the races, it was right.
“So now I’m going to say we were up here a top team and I mean no disrespect to Leyton Orient you know in relation to Sheffield Wednesday. But they’re a team that have been very experienced in this league so we have to treat them with respect and we have to treat them that they’re not an easy opposition because we’re the newbies in this league.
“And we kind of got a good grip on the game first half. As the half went on, I felt that we would kind of just lose in the mere confidence in what we were doing,. And then we started giving up a bit more of a bit too much space.
“Second half, you know, I felt we might come out and put the pressure on them down that end, and then we conceded, and then it’s, you know, you don’t even want to play.”
With just 10 first team regulars from last season still at the club and another London derby coming up on Monday 7 September against AFC Wimbledon, Woodman made it clear that he can’t continue to rotate his squad and needs a group that settles and get a grip as a group and on games.
“They’re up there but there’s players on the bench last year, they came in tonight and, you know, you can argue well they’ve had good shots, and you know, can’t keep rotating, rotating, rotating. We’ve got to have a team now that starts settling down, and start getting a grip of each other and start getting a grip of football matches.
“And at the moment, we are not looking like that and we’ll be grafting like we do all the time. Very hard to make sure that we start making it sound a little bit more difficult for people at the moment. And guess what, you know, we’re putting our time down our own back, if we’re not careful.”
With a second London derby on the horizon next week, Woodman issued a reprimand that every match in League One is massive and should be embraced.
“Big game, yeah, big game. I mean they’re all going to be big games, man. They’re all going to be tough games.
“You know that, and you should be embracing that. I’m embracing it and it probably doesn’t feel like I am at the moment but trust me, I will be knocked down in tools and I will not be coming in sulking.
“I’ll be coming ready to fight and I’ll be having to fight or scrap like I’ve done day one for this football club.
“I haven’t come this far to come this far now, I’ll tell you now.”
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