First-half display simply awesome

Latics assistant manager Gerry Taggart writes for Chron Sport every Friday

WE knew we were in for a tough game at Dagenham with the way they play.

They try to put teams under a lot of pressure by playing percentage football and I don't think they will be beaten many times down at Victoria Road this season.

We knew how important it was to get through to half-time without conceding and we managed that.

We could then give the lads a couple of pointers towards breaking them down.

They chucked everything they had at us in the first half and we dealt with it.

It wasn't a pretty game to watch, but in the second half it laid the groundwork for us to play — and when one of our opportunities came, we managed to convert it into a goal.

Tiredness crept in towards the end of the Exeter game on Tuesday night.

Some of the football in the first half was excellent and our attacking play was relentless.

You have got to remember that we had three lads under the age of 20 — Carl Winchester, Cedric Evina and Aidan White — playing in the game.

Carl has only just turned 17 and he got a bit exposed, but didn't get an awful lot of help, either, from the players around him. It is something we need to address.

We are learning all the time and in the cold light of day it is probably not a bad result.

Yes, we would have loved to have won 3-0 and to have kept another clean sheet.

But you have to take things from every game and there were certainly plenty of things to take out of the Exeter match.

There was probably a bit of naivety on our part, too, in terms of the management side. Maybe we could have changed things differently.

We would definitely have taken the same players off as they were all either sick or cramping up.

We were forced into changes. The legs of the lads on loan from Arsenal (Evina) and Leeds (White) had gone a bit, which is understandable as they hadn't played regular football until moving here.

Tactically, we could have done things differently. But hindsight is a wonderful thing.