Steve Bruce states Blackpool didn’t live up to their recent standards in his first defeat since taking over at Bloomfield Road last month.
The Seasiders were on the receiving of a 2-0 defeat to Mansfield Town at Field Mill, as their five-match unbeaten run under the new head coach came to an end.
In the first half, Will Evans scored twice for the Stags, with Stephen McLaughlin providing support on both goals.
The postponement of Blackpool’s trip to Bristol Rovers next week has given them two weeks to get ready for their October 19 home match against Barnsley.
“It’s never nice to go into an international break when you’ve lost, but we’ve got to accept that we weren’t good enough,” Bruce said.
that’s really frustrating that we haven’t performed well enough, and I didn’t see that coming given the expectations that have been set.
We can’t just give goals away; we need to improve if we want to win a football game. We haven’t addressed the crosses that have come in at a distance of fifty yards. Although it’s annoying, we know we can do better because it was so simple for him. They did their homework on us defensively, so I don’t want to hunt for an explanation.
It was really challenging, and even though it was quite easy to win the game—especially in the first half—we fell short, which is frustrating given our recent strong performance.
“We have done a lot of the fundamentals over the last six weeks, but we didn’t do them well enough. I felt incredibly let down that we didn’t accomplish more.
Mansfield is a tough team. We were prepared for the challenges posed by Nigel Clough’s team, Cloughy; they are a formidable opponent. It was disappointing that we didn’t exhibit more resiliency against them in the first half.
“We fell very short of the levels we had been meeting. You have to defend better than we did when you leave home, which is regrettably not what we did.
“We have to hold our hands up and learn from it, but they were the better team that day, and the longer the game went on, the more frustrating it got.”
