Breaking News:Jim Goodwin regrets Dundee Utd lack of ‘cynical’ foul to wipe out Tom Lawrence Rangers goal chance
Jim Goodwin admits he’d have been content to see a Dundee United player wipe out Tom Lawrence with a “cynical foul” before the Rangers winner this afternoon.
The Englishman dinked the ball over goalkeeper Jack Walton to seal all three points for the visitors at Tannadice and the manager was frustrated with his players’ refusal to make the tackle. The Tangerines have started the season with two wins and two draws from four as their unbeaten run was ended today and Goodwin bemoaned their decision-making at times.
He was also gutted to lose a preventable goal as he felt the Terrors gave themselves too much work to do towards the end of the game as they failed to really test Jack Butland.
Obviously we didn’t start well,” the Irishman said. “The shape of the team wasn’t working early on. I think that’s where the goal ultimately comes from. We were a little bit bare in the middle of the pitch.
“But the frustrating thing is that it actually comes from our throw-in initially. We need to make a tackle at some point, whether it’s a cynical foul or something like that, to prevent Lawrence from entering into the penalty box. That’s the disappointment. Whenever you play against Celtic or Rangers, you always speak about the first 15 minutes and staying in the game. We gave ourselves a bit of a mountain to climb from that moment onwards.
But when we changed the shape I thought we did a lot better. We put [Ross] Docherty in there just to protect the centre-backs. We were able to then press the game that little bit higher and be a bit more aggressive.”
Goodwin added: “I can’t have any complaints or arguments about the end result. We were a lot better in the second half, I thought. But with all the possession that we did have, we didn’t really create anything of real worth.
“So we are disappointed, but can’t be too hard on the players in terms of what they put into the game. I suppose it could have been quite easy for heads to go down, conceding such an early goal.
“It’s disappointing to lose our unbeaten run here. But we’ve got another massive game coming up [against Motherwell] on Friday evening in the quarter-final of the cup to get ourselves prepared for.”
Be the first to comment