Published on Wed Jan 26 15:32:28 GMT 2011
PAUL Hurst launched a furious tirade at his Boston United squad last night – branding their victory over Redditch as their worst performance since he took over at the club.
The Pilgrims moved up to fourth spot in the Blue Square Bet North after a lacklustre win against the league’s spirited bottom club.
Boston may have won 1-0, but their performance was passionless, over-confident and downright boring.
A visibly downbeat Hurst also described his side as ‘lucky’ and told his players none of them would have any complaints if they were dropped for Saturday’s trip to Stalybridge.
However, he did single out stand-in central defenders Gareth Jelleyman and Simon Ashton for some praise.
Here are his comments in full...
“We won and kept a clean sheet – after that, you find me a positive.
“I would have thought the people watching the game would have fallen asleep.
“That’s as poor as we’ve been and we we’re lucky to walk away with three points.
“They hit the post with a header and on another day that would have gone in.
“I didn’t see it, but they seem to think they had a good shout for a penalty. Had they scored it we would have had no arguments.
“No disrespect to Redditch, but they’re bottom of the league and I found our performance embarrassing.
“If players think they can play like that then they’ve got another thing coming.
“People moan if they’re not in the team or if they get dropped for a game but we tell them our door’s always open. But at the moment the door is shut, because if people play like that they can have no argument when they come to see us.
“They’re all lucky we can’t go and get loads of new players in. If we had to pick a team for Saturday right now I don’t know if there would be more than two names we’d put on there.
“I was pleased with the way the central defenders played. I think Jelleyman and Simon (Ashton) can leave with some credit. They were about as good as it got.
“Without being disrespectful to Redditch, it was a good time to play them.
“It was a woeful performance. We back the players and we’re honest with them You could say we’re hard task masters, but that’s to improve them.
“But that’s as bad as we’ve been since we’ve been here.”
