Tom Cleverley has blasted Plymouth Argyle for a “flat” loss to Burton Albion to miss out on a chance to top League One.
Cleverley’s Argyle missed a chance to go top of League One last Saturday (26 September) as they fell to a narrow 1-0 loss to Burton, through Jack Armer’s 70th-minute rebound winner at Home Park after Murphy Cooper blocked Caylan Vickers’ shot.
“I think the word certainly to describe the first half would be ‘flat’,” commented Cleverley to pafc.co.uk on the opening 45 minutes as he rued the lack of attacking quality on offer.
“We don’t lose that many duels, we don’t lose that many second balls and we don’t have so little attacking play when we do the things we are good at, so I’m disappointed with that and we will be working on and addressing that.
“I can accept missed chances and I can accept balls given away, but I can’t accept a lack of intensity, especially not here.”
The 37-year-old manager proceeded to iterate that the lack of attacking spark would be addressed in training ahead of their trip to Leyton Orient on 3 October.
“It will be addressed. It’s a group of players that have had a really good spell and deserve a chance to react from this today. When we take our foot off the gas, or we come off our intensity, we are a lot less effective for sure.
“That’s nine out of ten games Burton have scored first so we knew how important the start was. I didn’t think we put them under anywhere near as much pressure as we normally do to teams here, but still we created the best chances in the game.
“The big thing for me is, how do we not lose those games? You can’t be at your best every game, so we are going to have days where we are off it a little bit, but those are the days you have to come away with the points.
“We just simply can’t lose that game today with the chances we had and the lack of chances they had.
“We need to come away from that with minimum a point, because then it feels like not such a stunt in momentum, we need to improve that.”
Cleverley though noted that his five substitutes; Caleb Watts, Joe Edwards, Xavier Arnaechi, Bradley Ibrahim and Mathias Ross brought the needed intensity in the second half, as evidenced by 10 of their 13 overall shots having been produced after half time.
“I thought [the substitutes] brought energy and intensity, and that showed in the attacking play; we had ten shots in the second half as opposed to three shots first half.
“We know what we need to do to give ourselves the best chance to be effective. First half, we didn’t do it, the second-half substitutes brought that.
“Ultimately, we are paying the price for a lack of intensity and what happens in the final actions. They took their chance, and we didn’t take three or four big ones of our own.
“What I will say about the team is that they’re very good at reacting to these wake-up calls and then going on a run and not seeing a flat performance and understanding how we are at our most effective.”
The result left Plymouth fourth in the table on goal difference after Stockport County beat Peterborough 1-0 to climb to third.
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