Lee wants the luxury of a lead

CHARLIE McDonald celebrates his equalising goal for Athletic against Crewe on Saturday. The 1-1 draw came after three defeats in a row for Lee Johnson’s team.

ATHLETIC would have struggled to compete with ANY side in the first half on Saturday.

So says manager Lee Johnson, who says four of his players “weren’t at the races” as Crewe established a first-half lead.

It was the seventh time in eight matches that Athletic have fallen behind this season.

The goal now is to build on the point gained by Charlie MacDonald’s equaliser and take it into the next game - a tricky away-day at Crawley.

And ideally, this time it will be Athletic who get on scoresheet first.

“I’d love to get that first goal,” Johnson said. “We started all right against Crewe then there was a series of events in which eight or nine players gave the ball away,

“In the first half we had four not on it and if they are not, it doesn’t matter if you are playing against the youth team or Manchester United, you are playing with seven men. I had to change it.”

Johnson’s second-half substitution of the dangerous James Dayton was down to fatigue.

“He hadn’t trained up until Friday,” Johnson added. “He had gone for quite a while without training, so I thought if I could get 70 minutes out of him that would be good.”

While the manager feels the Crawley game will be another difficult test, he will hope to be able to pick Cristian Montano.

Montano missed the Crewe draw due to surgery.

“Cristian has a cyst he has had to have drained in surgery,” Johnson said.

Genseric Kusunga also missed out, as a precautionary measure, with a tight hamstring.

“It has been hard to get a settled team out and I don’t think I have been able to put out the same team twice in a row,” said Johnson