Grayson admits his Blackpool winners were second best
Posted Sunday, August 18, 2019 by PA
Blackpool might be sitting pretty with three wins from three Sky Bet League One games but manager Simon Grayson insists his team have many areas to improve.
Ryan Edwards’ header and Armand Gnanduillet’s penalty put the Seasiders 2-0 up against Oxford but they were holding on in the second half for their 2-1 success after Josh Ruffels pulled one back just before the break.
Blackpool join Lincoln with a 100 per cent winning record but Grayson admits they were far from their best in the Bloomfield Road contest.
He said: “We’ve won a game, which I’m delighted about.
“When I analyse the game, I think we were probably second best all today in all departments and hopefully that’s an honest assessment of it all.
“I thought we were two or three yards off the pace. They’re a good team on their day and if you don’t stop them from passing it around and getting tight, they can hurt teams – but we just didn’t seem to have that spark about us.
“Retention of the ball was poor, but what we did was grind a result out and got three points.
“The stats will say they’ve had loads more shots, they’ll have had loads more possession, but the only one that I’m interested in is the one that says we won the game and got three points.
“I’m sure that Karl [Robinson] will be disappointed that they’ve not got something out of the game because I think they deserved to get something.”
The result was Oxford’s first of the season and they almost saved a point, with Jamie Hanson smacking the bar in the second half with a header.
Boss Robinson was left to rue their lack of a cutting edge and is still hoping to sign a striker.
He said: “We missed chance after chance after chance – we hit the post, we hit the bar – there’s not much more my players can do, other than we’ve got to bring a striker in.
“I don’t think many better teams will come here this year and perform like that against a very, very good Blackpool team – you’ve got to show them tremendous respect – but we looked by far the better team here.
“I said to the players ‘if you’re going to lose, gentlemen, this is how we lose’. I’m not saying we want to become losers, far from it, but if you lose, lose that way. Lose with them hanging on.
“I thought we dominated for 86 minutes. The first goal we switched off early on from a set-piece.
“The next one is not a penalty and they score from that, we’ve not conceded a goal from open play this season still.”
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