Report by Julian Tyley
Bay manager Jay Bates gave his thoughts on last night’s narrow defeat at West Auckland.
“A frustrating night, you go from the highs of Saturday to the lows on a Tuesday. Coming away to West Auckland’s never easy but it’s frustrating when you’re not taking your chances first half and you concede in the 47th minute, then go in 1-0 down when you could have been going in 3 up. I don’t think they could have argued that we couldn’t have been one, two maybes three up at half time so yes it’s a frustrating night.
“There were a couple of chances that had fallen and I thought we just could have been a lot better. The keeper’s made a couple of saves and there’s one where the defender’s made a last gasp challenge. In the final third it was just a bit sloppy at times. We were getting in really good areas and we didn’t manage to punish them.
“Second half they were playing the game out, you could see the resilience in them. They’re a good unit, they’re a physical unit, they shut shop and they’ve done well at shutting up shop, and took every opportunity to time waste as much as they could.
“You could see there it was very slow, the first 20 minutes of the second half was very sluggish and they killed the game and in the last 25 minutes, I think we could have got another two goals quite easily if wasn’t for the resilience of that team. They’ve done really well to be fair to them.
“You could tell it was a big achievement for them. I think a few of their players walked off the pitch and said ‘you played us off the park, you’ll be up there’ but that means nothing. We didn’t get the result, but they knew that they were in a game tonight, that’s the main thing.
It’s one of those days. When you don’t take your chances you’re never going to win games. We go back to the drawing board, the lads have played a lot of games now, a lot of midweek games. If you look across the last seven weeks, we’ve had a lot of travelling, but we’ll go again on Saturday and we’ll be alright.”
Whitley have had a remarkable run of tough away games, all so far have been against the top five sides.
“You look at the top five, Boro Rangers, Redcar, West Auckland were all away midweek games. It’s not easy, they’re not easy places to come and especially on a midweek evening. It’s a lot easier at a weekend when lads have not done work and then had to get in a car and travel down through traffic. But I’m not complaining, there’s no excuses about it, they’re all good teams and rightly so they’re up there.”
