'I am angry' - Grant McCann's verdict as Doncaster Rovers are 'punished' by Chesterfield
Doncaster Rovers manager Grant McCann was ‘angry’ at his team’s mistakes in their 5-2 defeat to Chesterfield.
The Spireites were ruthless as they led 2-0 and 4-1 before eventually winning 5-2 as Bim Pepple, Dylan Duffy and Michael Olakigbe all scored their first goals for the club.
“All in all I think it is a good learning curve for us tonight,” McCann told BBC Radio Sheffield. “I am hoping this is going to be a good thing for us. Chesterfield are a good team, Paul (Cook) will probably come out and say his team were outstanding tonight, my team were good as well in spells of the game. People talk about both boxes, that was the difference tonight. We got undone from our own doing, things that we have done really well in recent weeks. I am angry about how we got punished so easily off of mistakes and we didn’t punish their mistakes and I think that was the tale of the game.”
Goals from Duffy and Pepple put Town 2-0 up before Luke Molyneux pulled one back before half-time but instead of kicking-on in the second-half the visitors allowed Chesterfield to take the game away from them.
McCann continued: “I thought in the first-half we got the press right, we were good against them, the two goals were mistakes from us. The first one is flipped in behind us and a bit of a miscommunication and then Teddy (Sharman-Lowe) slips. There is not much you can do about that. The second one was a set-play and we pride ourselves on that. We did the first bit well but not the second bit.
"We had two really good chances before they scored that we should really score. We came back into the game, we scored a good goal and I was thinking ‘we will have a good go at them in the second-half, let’s be on the front-foot, stay strong and let’s get after them.’ But we were the total opposite. We didn’t get to the ball, we gave them too much time, for 20 minutes or so they were better than us, way better than us, and we gave them two goals that we can avoid.”
Continuing his analysis of Chesterfield’s goals, McCann added: "We should have made a tackle in the corner for the third goal but we didn’t and they break on transition and the fourth goal is just a give-and-go and we didn’t pick up the striker in the box. At that point you were thinking we needed to stem the flow of the game and it felt like every time they came forward we were going to make a mistake. The fifth one is just a mistake.”
Rovers, who host Crystal Palace in the FA Cup on Monday, remain second in the table ahead of this weekend’s games, while Chesterfield climb a place to ninth and close the gap to the play-offs to five points.