Angry Dickov promises to ring changes

NO WAY THROUGH: Tom Adeyemi’s charge forward is blocked.

PAUL Dickov admitted he struggled to believe the level of his side’s first-half performance against Hartlepool, promising to ring the changes to shake things up.

Kieran Lee and Jean-Yves Mvoto are likely to return to the line-up for the visit of Notts County to Boundary Park on Saturday, as Athletic try to rectify a home record which now features six defeats.

But one man who is unlikely to play is James Wesolowski.

The Australian battler dislocated his shoulder in the first minute of a dire opening period for Athletic in which the visitors dominated and could easily have been three goals, rather than the one registered by James Poole, to the good by the time the teams retired to the changing rooms.

“Hindsight is a great thing,” said adisappointed Dickov, who promised to not repeat the exercise of giving his players a Christmas Day break from training.

“But one thing is for sure, Jim is a big player for us. Consistently, he and Kieran Lee have been our top players this year.

“When Jim is not in the team, we do miss him. But I feel we have a good squad here and the players should still have done better than they did.

“They scored when Jim was off the pitch. But it wasn’t due to us being a man down. It was a flick-on and us not picking up the second ball, which happened too often.

“I couldn’t believe what I was watching in the first half, with the things we have worked on in the last few days. You will get times when you are not playing well. But when that happens, you want one or two to pull you out of it and we didn’t have that.

“There will definitely be changes. There were going to be changes for Notts County even before this game. “There might be a few more now.”

While Hartlepool looked incisive and clever on the break – not a surprise, given their excellent record of five previous wins on the road – Athletic were ponderous even in a second half in which they had the majority of possession, without fashioning many scoring opportunities.

Dickov said that his side’s struggle to break down stubborn opposition is something they will continue to have to deal with at Boundary Park.

“They came here with people behind the ball and that will happen more and more, because speaking to managers and scouts they know that if they let us pass the ball we are a dangerous team,” Athletic’s manager added.

“They came to try to stifle that and did it well, nicking a goal and getting everyone behind the ball.

“We had good passages of play in the second half, but our final ball really let us down and I can’t remember their goalkeeper being worked.

“I am disappointed, the fans are disappointed and the players are hurt as well because they know they didn’t perform.”