Sami Hyypia felt his players gave their all, in his first competitive game as Brighton & Hove Albion manager, but did admit his team lacked a cutting edge in the attacking third.The boss was pleased by the application shown by his side, despite being left empty handed on his Amex bow, as Albion went down 1-0 to Sheffield Wednesday, who won thanks to Giles Coke's clever goal.
Hyypia said, "We talked before the game that we needed to go back to the dressing room having given everything that we have got on the pitch, and I think we did that.
"It is not nice to lose but I can’t blame the players for their effort, which overall was very good.
"We lacked a little bit of quality in the final third – we could have had more chances and we could have played the ball in better areas. The final ball wasn’t quite there, so that was perhaps the one thing that we were lacking.
"The team tried very hard to get back in the game, but could not get the equalising goal. It was a good save from Keiren Westwood to prevent Chris O’Grady."
Albion played more than forty minutes with then men, after referee James Linington sent off Andrew Crofts for a later tackle on Sam Hutchison - but Hyypia remained tight-lipped on his opinion on the decision.
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He added, "It is not easy when you are 1-0 down and with only ten men but we kept going and I was happy how we did throughout the game."The red card made it more difficult. The referee makes the decisions and I do not want to say anything about the red card. We have to accept the decisions that the referee makes.
"We shouldn’t put pressure on referees. Refereeing is very difficult anyway. He made that kind of decision, we have to accept it.
"All the speculation – was it a red card or not – it’s just a waste of time now. I can’t change the decision, so I don't want to talk about it.
"We could have made some better decisions – and maybe we would have maybe created a few more chances that way – but overall it was not a bad performance, although it is very irritating to lose.
"We need to analyse what we can do now. We will see where we can do better work on the training field and hopefully we’ll do it better on Tuesday.
"We have a big task to get into the next round of the cup. That won’t be an easy task and our mentality has to be right from the start, otherwise the danger is we will make it very difficult."
Hyypia also revealed that Solly March was ruled out by a minor back injury, but hopes to have him available for the Cheltenham match on Tuesday.
He added, "Before the game we had a problem with Solly March. He was injured and couldn’t play, but Solly would have started if he was fit.
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"This morning I was hoping he could play, but when we tested it he wasn’t able to play. He had some stiffness in his back we didn’t want to take any risk with him, so we decided to leave him out."
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[h=2]UPCOMING HOME FIXTURES[/h] [h=3]ALBION V SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY[/h] SATURDAY 9TH AUGUST, KICK-OFF 3PM
[h=3]ALBION V CHELTENHAM[/h] TUESDAY 12TH AUGUST, KICK-OFF 7.45PM
[h=3]Albion v BOLTON[/h] SATURDAY 23RD AUGUST, kick-off 3pm
Original article