Frustrated Ipswich Town boss’ admission after leaving rearranged Portsmouth showdown empty-handed
The Ipswich boss reacts to the circumstances his team faced at a white-hot Fratton Park, as last night’s Championship clash took place after two previous postponements.
Kieran McKenna admitted his Ipswich Town team didn’t do enough as they felt the heat of bearpit Fratton under the lights.
And the Tractor Boys boss acknowledged the strength of Pompey on their own turf with their fans behind them at full voice, as they succumbed to a 2-0 defeat last night.
McKenna: ‘Tough coming here at end of season when they're fighting for everything’
Pompey turned up the intensity on McKenna’s side to end their nine-game unbeaten run, with the match finally played after two pitch postponements this year - the first of which caused plenty of consternation for the Ipswich boss and his club.
That created a scenario where the promotion chasers arrived at Fratton Park with John Mousinho’s men fighting for their lives at the end of the campaign, while their crippling injury list from the turn of the year has eased to some extent.
McKenna told the East Anglian Daily Times: ‘When you concede the first goal here from a set play with the atmosphere as it was tonight, it's all just going to be really tough and to do it just before half-time was a blow.
‘We're really disappointed with that goal and then to concede probably a minute later if you take the celebrations out of it, that killed the game for us and that's really the key couple of minutes in the game.
‘Before that, we would like to have played a bit better in terms of creating chances, but it was always going to be a tough night.
‘If we get to half-time at 0-0, it's probably been a pretty steady first half and we're in a position to push on. But you let the game go like that in a couple of minutes before half-time and a really difficult game becomes, not impossible, but much, much, much more challenging.
‘You would have to do fantastically well in that second half to turn it around and we didn't manage to do that.
‘We tried to get lots of attackers on the pitch and push in the second half. You need to get that first goal, be efficient. We got some good areas, but we weren't efficient enough to create or take a big chance.
‘It’s a big atmosphere here and they were going into every challenge with everything they had.
‘Any time you have Saturday away or Tuesday away in the Championship is tough. When you have a derby match, it's also tough.
‘If you come here on a Tuesday night, it doesn't matter where you're coming from, it's going to be tough coming here at the end of the season when they're fighting for everything.
‘They're good in games like this where they're against the top teams. It's not a coincidence that they've beaten teams around us this year as well. It was always going to be a tough game and we were going to have to do a top performance to win it.
‘We didn't deliver a top performance, we didn't do enough. As I say, it's also important to keep perspective because it's not like you come out of Saturday and say everything was perfect and fantastic and tonight everything's a disaster.
‘Especially at this stage of the season, the margins are really fine, and if you go away from home and get a set play goal early in the game, you give yourself a great chance.
‘If you come away from home on a night like tonight and concede a set play goal on 42 minutes, you've probably ruined your work in the first half and certainly when you double that up with another goal. The margins are fine at this stage of the season and they didn't go for us tonight, but we didn't do well enough for them to go for us tonight.
‘We'll have to take that in a chin and then we get ready and look forward to the next game.’
Ipswich showed the impressive resources as their disposal, as they introduced the likes of Jaden Philogene and Pompey tormentor Anis Mehmeti in the second half, after conceding two goals in 130 seconds just before the break.
But Pompey stood firm, with the Ipswich boss acknowledging his team gave themselves too big a mountain to climb in the white-hot atmosphere they faced.
He added: ‘You can't bank on doing that too often (relying on their attacking talent).
‘We've done it at Stoke, but certainly away from home you can't bank on the fact that if you go 2-0 down at half-time, you give away the two goals as we did against a team with big motivation of their own, big crowd behind them - then the second half is going to be really tough.
‘When you don't get that first goal, their momentum stays really high, their energy stays really high, they defended well and we didn't do enough to threaten them until probably the last few moments.’