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Saturday’s 1-0 defeat to Everton, Mark Hughes has reflected further on
the late loss, and pinpointed the fact that not enough players were on
the top of their game.
Hughes also received another unwelcome injury
blow with the news that Benjani, replaced at half time on Saturday,
could be out for a number of weeks.
He said, “We’re a little bit
light on numbers at the moment. A number of the guys are carrying
injuries, so that will have an impact, and that’s difficult when you’ve
got games coming up thick and fast you have to have a fit and able
squad.
“At the moment we’re just struggling a little bit in
that respect. We’ve lost Benjani again at the weekend with a hamstring
and he’ll probably be out for a number of weeks. We’re a bit threadbare
in fairness, but we’ll see.”
As for the game itself, Hughes
added: “We didn’t quite have enough players playing at the top of their
form for many mitigating reasons. It’s very difficult to win Premier
League games when you haven’t got everybody at the top of their form.
“Robinho
trained well on Friday and was very much up for the game. The thing
with him is that you always think that he has the capacity, and rightly
so, that any given second he’s likely to produce something. You hold
out that hope and in the end he wasn’t having an impact in the game and
had to come off.
“I think nobody really dominated the game from
either team. The fact that it was a bit fragmented, stop and start and
lacked momentum, it suited Everton more than it suited us.
“You
are going to have games like that but when the opposition set you a
problem you have to be intelligent enough to know how to solve it. On
occasions we just played into their hands and didn’t ask the questions
that needed to be asked.”
And as the Blues boss knows Everton
have the top flight experience needed to come to places like the City
of Manchester Stadium and go home with all three points.
He
stated: “They understand the Premier League and know that you have to
work extremely hard, close people down, restrict good teams in key
areas of the field and Everton have done that very well over many
seasons.
“All we needed was a break at the right time, Shaun
hitting the bar, obviously if that goes in they’d have had to have come
out more and possible we could have won the game.
“As it was they
were quite comfortable and quite happy with the draw, as it was, but
they got a set play at the end and only sent three or four people up
and really we should deal with that.”
With results yesterday
going against the Blues, Newcastle and West Ham moved above City in the
Barclays Premier League for now, and the Manager concluded: “Ideally we
want more points on the board, that’s a given, but what we have to do
is make sure we pick up those points in the games that we have ahead of
us.
“We’re more than capable of doing that as we’ve proved this
season. When we’ve played well people see we’re a good side but on
occasion when teams frustrate us we haven’t had the answers and
Saturday was another case in point.
“The team on Saturday was
very close to the one that beat Portsmouth 6-0 so we need to understand
that when the team doesn’t perform collectively or individually then
it’s difficult to win games. I don’t think we deserved to lose the
game, but maybe didn’t do enough to win it.”
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