David Horseman was disappointed to see our EFL Trophy campaign come to an end with a 3-1 defeat to Cardiff City on Tuesday night.
Despite Marcel Washington giving us an early lead, the League One side drew level before half-time, and after Alexei Rojas was sent off, two second half goals sent the Bluebirds through at our expense.
“Really disappointing night,” Horseman said, “ I think we actually started the game relatively strong and got in their penalty box, and with a little bit more quality could’ve maybe scored quite early on.
“You think you’re going to take that performance on and then the game goes a bit 50/50, we score a really good goal through Marcel and at that point you think right, now it’s time to take control because the game’s starting to settle down.
“From the restart obviously, they score straight away, we lose the first duel, second duel, we don’t track our man and then our centre-backs don’t move their feet in the box and it’s 1-1.
“It’s a bit of a common theme with all of our (academy) teams at the moment, so it’s something that we’ve got to do better, but for it to just be winning two or three duels is really quite disappointing.”
Reflecting on what went wrong in the second half, Horseman pointed to the dismissal of goalkeeper Alexei Rojas as the key turning point in the tie.
“We get to half time and tweak a couple of little bits, and actually just as I thought the game was starting to settle down the back pass gets Alexei sent off and it’s backs to the wall a little bit.
“They scored a third in the end and it’s just a really disappointing night, because it’s a mixed team, we’ve given some opportunities and not enough took their opportunity tonight.
“As an academy your job is to put them on the stage to perform and the boys are good kids, they want to perform, but tonight was just not the right one for too many individuals I think.”
Defeat at the Cardiff City Stadium brought our Vertu Trophy campaign to an end, but our under-21s coach did take positives from the run despite a disappointing finale.
“Let’s be honest, we’ll never have a better chance of going through, it was a youth game tonight. It was our youth against their youth and tonight’s the most disappointing one.
“We went to Newport and represented ourselves really well, we got the win and I actually thought for large parts at Exeter, managing the game and the crowd, something the boys aren’t particularly used to, you get a lot of that in this competition, so you learn that.
“Exeter I thought we represented ourselves well, it was really exciting, we saw lots of talent, and good mentality and then tonight we let ourselves down from start to finish, it just wasn’t an Arsenal performance.”
While the mood in the dressing room was understandably low, Horseman emphasised the learning opportunities for our young Gunners.
“You can learn in the difficult moments, right now it hurts a lot but we’ll sit with the individuals, I think we need to sit with some individuals now, and have some good, honest conversations, show some video.
“They have to learn really quick because one thing you do learn is that Premier League 2 is nothing like the EFL Trophy. Winning your duels, getting second balls and being able to be calm and play away from pressure is something we don’t get a lot of practice at and we’ve struggled in key moments.
“There’s lots of learning and some in the dressing room will benefit hugely from it, and we are trying to produce individuals not teams because that is the academy, but I think we’ve missed an opportunity.”
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